It was medieval pot specialist Paul Blinkhorn who introduced me to the peculiar nature of archaeology in film. His lecture, delivered to an audience of summer diggers, was a smirky romp through the wilder fantasies of B-movie directors.
I won’t steal his punchline by telling you which movie came out tops for realism, in case you get a chance to hear it in person. Suffice to say, along the way we encountered any number of crystal skulls, escaped mummies, white worms, and Cluedo murders – but nothing that remotely resembled a real excavation.
No wonder, I thought. How do you turn the slow, methodical, almost static process of trowelling – heads down, bums up, chink-chink-chink – into a movie?
