The real life globe-trotting anthropologist Dr. Jones has died at 94

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MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Schuyler Jones, a globe-trotting American anthropologist and adventurer whose exploits drew comparisons to iconic movie character Indiana Jones, has died. He was 94.

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Jones grew up around Wichita, Kansas. His younger sister, Sharon Jones Laverentz, told the Wichita Eagle that her brother had visited every U.S. state before he was in first grade thanks to their father's job supplying Army bases with boots.

He wrote in an autobiography posted on Edinburgh University's website that he moved to Paris after World War II, where he worked as a photographer. He also spent four years in Africa as a freelance photographer. In his 1956 book “Under the African Sun,” he tells of surviving a helicopter crash in a marketplace in In Salah, Algeria

He later moved to Greece, where he supported himself by translating books from German and French to English. He decided to drive through India and Nepal in 1958. He said he fell in love with Afghanistan during the trip and later enrolled at Edinburgh to study anthropology.

After graduating he returned to Afghanistan and began to study local communities living in the country's remote eastern valleys. He parlayed that research into a doctorate at Oxford University and went on to become a curator and later director at Pitt Rivers Museum that houses the university's archeological and anthropological collection. Upon retirement, he was awarded the Commander of the Order of the British Empire award, one step below knighthood.

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Similarities between Jones and George Lucas' Henry “Indiana” Jones Jr. character are striking. Aside from the name and the family business — Indy's father, Henry Sr., was an archaeologist, just like Schuyler Jones' son, Peter, are archeologists — they were both adept at foreign languages and wore brown fedoras.

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