MADISON, Wis. — Schuylar Jones, a globe-trotting American adventurer whose exploits were compared to the iconic film character Indiana Jones, has died. He was 94 years old.
Jones’ daughter-in-law, Cassandra Da’Luz Vieira-Manion, posted on her Facebook page that Jones died on May 17. She said she had taken care of him for six years and “really thought he could live forever.”
“He was a fascinating man who lived for many years across the world,” she wrote.
Da’Luz Vieira-Manion did not immediately respond to messages from The Associated Press on Saturday.
Jones grew up around Wichita, Kansas. His younger sister, Sharon Jones Laverentz, told the Wichita Eagle that her brother visited every U.S. state before entering first grade thanks to their father’s job supplying military bases with boots.
He wrote in an autobiography published on the University of Edinburgh website that he moved to Paris after the Second World War, 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 described surviving a helicopter crash at a market in In Salah, Algeria, the Wichita Eagle reported. After the helicopter crashed, he discovered it was on fire; violent winds had rekindled the ashes of his pipe.
“The camels bawled and ran, scattering loads of firewood in all directions,” Jones wrote. “Children, Arabs and veiled women fled or fell headlong into the dust. The goats and donkeys went wild as the swirling, roaring monster landed in their mist…weak with relief, the pilot and I sat in the wreckage of In Salah Market and howled with laughter.
He then moved to Greece, where he supported himself by translating books from German and French into English. He decided to drive across India and Nepal in 1958. He said he fell in love with Afghanistan during the trip and later enrolled in Edinburgh to study anthropology.
“He was more interested in the people and cultures he was learning about than in photography and selling them,” his son, archaeologist Peter Jones, told the Wichita Eagle.
After graduating, he returned to Afghanistan and began studying the indigenous people living in the remote valleys of the country’s east. He turned this research into a doctorate at Oxford University and became curator and then director of that university’s Pitt Rivers Museum. On his retirement, he was awarded the Commander of the Order of the British Empire, one step below knighthood.
The similarities between Jones and George Lucas’ character Henry “Indiana” Jones Jr. are striking. Aside from the name and family business – Indy’s father, Henry Sr., was an archaeologist, as Schuyler Jones’ son, Peter, are archaeologists – they were both adept at foreign languages and wore brown fedoras .
And like Indy, Schuylar Jones thought the artifacts belonged in museums, Da’Luz Vieiria-Manion told the Wichita Eagle. Eric Cale, executive director of the Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum, told the newspaper that Jones made a permanent donation of his grandfather’s items to the museum. Jones wrote in his 2007 book “A Stranger Abroad” that he wanted to find the Ark of the Covenant and donate it to a museum, which is exactly what Indy accomplished in “Raiders of the Ark Lost” – at least until the US government seizes the Ark. relic and hid it again at the end of the film.
Pat O’Connor, an editor who worked with Jones, told the newspaper that Jones had a “low tolerance” for slow-witted and pretentious people.
“I have never met such a talented, capable and at the same time approachable man,” O’Connor said. “But if you have transgressed. . . trying to present yourself intellectually as slightly above your station, then that’s the end of it.
Jones wrote in “A Stranger Abroad” that he first heard of Indy in the 1980s, when a museum director in Madras asked him if he was the real version. He wrote that he had no idea what she was talking about, but then thought the comparison led more students to attend his classes at Oxford.
Jones was married twice, first to Lis Margot Sondergaard Rasmussen, then to Da’Luz Vieria-Manion’s mother Lorraine, who died in 2011. He then began a relationship with actress Karla Burns, who died in 2021, the Wichita Eagle reported.
He is survived by his son, three daughters, a sister, six grandchildren, six great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild, the newspaper reported.
ABC News
