MADISON, Wis. — Schuylar Jones, a globe-trotting American adventurer whose exploits drew comparisons to the iconic film character Indiana Jones, has died. He was 94.
Jones’ stepdaughter, Cassandra Da’Luz Vieira-Manion, posted on her Facebook page that Jones died on May 17. She said she had cared for him for the past six years and “really thought he would live forever.”
“He was a fascinating man who lived extensively around the world,” she wrote.
Da’Luz Vieira-Manion did not immediately respond to messages from The Associated Press on Saturday.
Jones grew up in 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 the first grade, thanks to their father’s job supplying army bases with boots.
He wrote in an autobiography on the Edinburgh University 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 tells of surviving a helicopter crash in a marketplace in Salah, Algeria, the Wichita Eagle reported. After the helicopter crashed, he discovered it was on fire; gale-force winds had reignited the ash in his pipe.
“Camels roared and ran, scattering loads of firewood in all directions,” Jones wrote. “Children, Arabs and veiled women fled or fell prostrate in the dust. Goats and donkeys went wild as the whirling, roaring monster landed in their mist…weak with relief, the pilot and I sat in the wreckage of In Salah’s marketplace and howled with laughter.
He later moved to Greece, where he supported himself by translating books from German and French into 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 in Edinburgh to study anthropology.
“He was more interested in the people and cultures he found than in photography and selling them,” his son, archaeologist Peter Jones, told the Wichita Eagle.
After graduating, he returned to Afghanistan and began studying indigenous people living in the country’s remote eastern valleys. He parlayed that research into a PhD at the University of Oxford and subsequently became curator and later director of that university’s Pitt Rivers Museum. After his retirement he was awarded the Commander of the Order of the British Empire, a step below the order of knighthood.
The 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 as Schuyler Jones’ son, Peter, are archaeologists — they were both proficient in foreign languages and wore brown fedora hats.
And like Indy, Schuylar Jones believed 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 permanently donated his grandfather’s artifacts to the museum. Jones wrote in his 2007 book “A Stranger Abroad” that he wanted to find the Ark of Covenant and donate it to a museum, which is exactly what Indy accomplished in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” — at least until the U.S. government relic and hid it again at the end of the film.
Pat O’Connor, a publisher who worked with Jones, told the newspaper that Jones had a “low tolerance” for slow and pretentious people.
“I have never met a man who is so talented and skilled and at the same time approachable,” O’Connor said. “But if you commit a transgression . . . by trying to present yourself intellectually as somewhat 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 later thought the comparison led to more students attending his lectures at Oxford.
Jones was married twice, first to Lis Margot Sondergaard Rasmussen, and then to Da’Luz Vieria-Manion’s mother, Lorraine, who died in 2011. He later began a relationship with actress Karla Burns, who died in 2021, the Wichita Eagle reported.
He is survived by a son, three daughters, a sister, six grandchildren, six great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild, the newspaper reported.