I’ve been trying to figure out whether this Washington Post column, “Real Archaeologists Don’t Wear Fedoras,” is tongue-in-cheek or not. In it, archaeologist Neil Asher Silberman expends more than 1,000 words to tell us plebes that the Indiana Jones you see on the big screen isn’t actually real.

I know that the Indiana Jones series is just a campy tribute to the Saturday afternoon serials of the 1930s and the B-movies of the 1950s, but believe me, it totally misrepresents who archaeologists are and what goals we pursue. It’s filled with exaggerated and inaccurate nonsense. Even the centerpiece of the new movie — the “crystal skull” — is a phony.

The crystal skull…a phony? What a turn-off. When I buy my ticket to an Indiana Jones movie, I’m paying for verisimilitude, dammit!