Chapter Overview

From the ancient pyramids of Egypt to the exotic bazaars of Morocco, Indiana Jones finds excitement, danger and adventure at every turn. While on an archaeological dig in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, Indy uncovers an ancient mummy and a fresh corpse. With the help of T.E. Lawrence, the legendary Lawrence of Arabia, Indy solves an intriguing murder mystery only to find himself thrust right back into danger when he is kidnapped by slave-trading brigands. Dragged on a terrifying journey across the burning sands of North Africa to the slave markets of Marrakesh, Indy finds that he must rely on his courage and wits to survive the brutal ordeal

People and Topics

Documentary Previews

Below you will find information about each documentary that supplements My First Adventure.

Archaeology: Unearthing Our Past	Man's history on Earth dates back at least tens of thousands of years, yet written records stretch back to only a fraction of that. Helping clarify the picture of humanity past is the science of archaeology. Though the cinematic escapades of Indiana Jones describe a world of globe-trotting adventure, in truth archaeologists are more like detectives, piecing together clues to mysteries of what has come before. Produced and written by Adam Sternberg.. Running Time: (0:19:17) Exclusive Documentary Preview! No video? Watch in Flash!
Howard Carter and the Tomb of Tutankhamun	Howard Carter's unflagging persistence and stubbornness led to one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the 20th century: the tomb of King Tut. Yet it was that same strong-headedness that would time and again jeopardize Carter's career. Learn more about the man and his discovery which propelled Egyptology into the pop culture landscape. Produced and written by Adam Sternberg.. Running Time: (0:22:34) Exclusive Documentary Preview! No video? Watch in Flash!
Colonel Lawrence's War: T.E. Lawrence and Arabia	He was an action hero as well as an intellectual hero. T.E. Lawrence escaped a safe office job during World War I to become a guerilla war mastermind in desert combat, fighting alongside Arabs to throw off the rule of the Ottoman Empire. But despite British promises of Arab independence, the Middle East would end up being carved by European colonial treaties, and Lawrence faced the challenges of keeping his word to his trusted compatriots of the desert. Produced and written by Sharon Wood.. Running Time: (0:36:05) This documentary is also available with the bonus features for Chapter 15: Daredevil's of the Desert
From Slavery to Freedom	Humanity has lived in, with and on the profits of slavery for most of its history. Many of its greatest achievements and monuments have tragically been built on the backs of slave labor. How could people place their economic needs ahead of the humanity of their fellow beings? How could this horrific system have lasted for so long? In this documentary track the history of slavery from Ancient Greece, to the Crusades, to the colonization of the new world and the racial slavery that sparked the American Civil War. The journey from slavery to freedom is incomplete and continues as there are still over 20 million people enslaved today. Produced and written by Mark Page. . Running Time: (0:30:08) Exclusive Documentary Preview! No video? Watch in Flash!

Indy Connections: My First Adventure

Below are current event articles that relate to events, topics, and people found in My First Adventure.

Starving Settlers in Jamestown Colony Resorted to Cannibalism

Smithsonian.com

5/1/2013

The harsh winter of 1609 in Virginia’s Jamestown Colony forced residents to do the unthinkable. A recent excavation at the historic site discovered the carcasses of dogs, cats and horses consumed during the season commonly called the “Starving Time.” But a few other newly discovered bones in particular, though, tell a far more gruesome story: the dismemberment and cannibalization of a 14-year-old English girl.

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8 Mummy Finds Revealing Ancient Disease

Nationalgeographic.com

3/21/2013

Whether laid to rest in a simple grave or a grand tomb, the human body rarely survives the sweep of time. But in a few places where people deliberately mummified their dead, or the environmental conditions were right—very dry or wet—flesh and bone are preserved. Today these remains, probed by modern CT scans, MRIs, and DNA tests, are offering intriguing insights into how people lived and died long ago. A 2011 study of 52 mummies in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo showed that almost half had clogged arteries, the kind of condition that can lead to a heart attack or stroke.

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Failure to Hunt Rabbits Part of Neanderthals' Demise?

Nationalgeographic.com

3/11/2013

Rabbits are small, fast, and devilishly hard to catch. And that could have had dire consequences for Neanderthals. A new study suggests that an inability to shift from hunting large mammals to wild rabbits and other small game may have contributed to the downfall of European Neanderthals during the Middle Paleolithic period, about 30,000 years ago. "There have been some studies that examined the importance of rabbit meat to hominins"—or early human ancestors—"but we give it a new twist," said study lead author John Fa, a biologist at the United Kingdom's Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and Imperial College London. "We show in our study that [modern humans] used rabbits extensively, but Neanderthals didn't."

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This 33,000-Year-Old Skull Belonged to One of the World’s First Dogs

Smithsonian.com

3/6/2013

In 1975, a team of Russian archaeologists announced that they’d made a remarkable find: From a cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia, they’d unearthed a 33,000-year-old fossil skull that resembled a wolf. In 2011, an anatomical analysis suggested that the fossil was a hybrid of a wolf (with its large teeth) and a dog (with its shortened snout), raising the possibility that it was a partly domesticated wolf—in other words, one of the oldest ancestors of the modern dog ever discovered. At the time, though, DNA analysis was needed to make certain that the fossil came from an ancestor of man’s best friend. A paper published today in the journal PLOS ONE confirms that fact, indicating that the creature was more closely related to modern dogs than wolves, and forcing scientists to reconsider the dog’s evolutionary family tree.

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Return of the Neanderthals

Nationalgeographic.com

3/6/2013

For now, the Neanderthal genome is an abstract string of billions of DNA letters stored in computer databases. But it naturally sparks the imagination: Could scientists use that genetic blueprint to create neo-Neanderthals in the flesh? In the not-so-distant future, advances in genetic engineering might enable that feat, experts say. But whether such a resurrection should happen is another story. Since the 1996 birth of Dolly the sheep, the world's first cloned mammal, scientists have greatly expanded and improved on cloning techniques. They have cloned dogs, cats, rats, pigs, and cows, among other species. In 2003, researchers in Spain were the first to bring back an extinct species—the Pyrenean ibex, a wild mountain goat also called a bucardo—though the clone only lived for a few minutes.

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Finders Keepers? Not Always in Treasure Hunting

Nationalgeographic.com

3/6/2013

In September 2009, David Booth, a park ranger in Stirling, Scotland, packed up his brand-new metal detector ("I practiced at home picking up nails and bits"), drove to a field, walked seven yards (six meters) from his parked car, and scored big. His first sweep with a metal detector yielded a spectacular find: four gold torques, or neck bands, from the first century B.C.—the most important hoard of Iron Age gold found in Scotland to date. Several days later, Stuart Campbell of the National Museum of Scotland, the man in charge of "treasure trove" finds, as they are known in the United Kingdom, arrived at his Edinburgh office, opened his email to find a message with the subject "gold jewelry" and thought, "Oh, no, not another Victorian watch chain." Then he saw the images.

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What’s Inside a 2,000-Year-Old, Shipwreck-Preserved Roman Pill?

Smithsonian.com

1/7/2013

Around 120 B.C.E., the Relitto del Pozzino, a Roman shipping vessel, sank off the coast of Tuscany. More than two millennia later, in the 1980s and 90s, a team sent by the Archeological Superintendency of Tuscany began to excavate the ruins, hauling up planks of rotting wood. “It wasn’t an easy task. The wreck is covered by marine plants and their roots. This makes it hard to excavate it,” underwater archaeologist Enrico Ciabatti told Discovery News in 2010. “But our efforts paid off, since we discovered a unique, heterogeneous cargo.”

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Antigua’s Disputed Slave Conspiracy of 1736

Smithsonian.com

1/2/2013

Breaking on the wheel was the most horrific punishment ever visited on a convicted criminal. It was a form of crucifixion, but with several cruel refinements; in its evolved form, a prisoner was strapped, spreadeagled, to a large cartwheel that was placed axle-first in the earth so that it formed a rotating platform a few feet above the ground. The wheel was then slowly rotated while an executioner methodically crushed the bones in the condemned man’s body, starting with his fingers and toes and working inexorably inward. An experienced headsman would take pride in ensuring that his victim remained conscious throughout the procedure, and when his work was done, the wheel would be hoisted upright and fixed in the soil, leaving the condemned to hang there until he died from shock and internal bleeding a few hours or a few days later.

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Document Deep Dive: Emancipation Proclamation

Smithsonian.com

12/19/2012

When President Abraham Lincoln read the first draft of his Emancipation Proclamation to his Cabinet on July 22, 1862, it was to mixed reviews. Undeterred, he gathered that it would be best to announce his plan to free the slaves in seceded states on the heels of a Union victory. So, he waited.

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Cavemen Were Much Better At Illustrating Animals Than Artists Today

Smithsonian.com

12/5/2012

The iconic caveman in popular culture is Fred Flintstone: slow-witted and unskilled. In general, we think of the cave art produced by prehistoric people as crude and imprecise too—a mere glimmer of the artistic mastery that would blossom millenia later, during the Renaissance and beyond.

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Suggested Lessons

• Traces: Historic Archaeology
• Slavery and the American Founding: The “Inconsistency not to be excused”
• The Growing Crisis of Sectionalism in Antebellum America: A House Dividing
• Taking Up Arms and the Challenge of Slavery in the Revolutionary Era
• Slavery, the Crisis of the Union, the Civil War, and Reconstruction
• From Courage to Freedom: Frederick Douglass's 1845 Autobiography
• Slave Narratives: Constructing U.S. History Through Analyzing Primary Sources
• Perspective on the Slave Narrative
• Egypt's Pyramids: Monuments with a Message
• Egyptian Symbols and Figures: Hieroglyphs
• The Cuneiform Writing System in Ancient Mesopotamia: Emergence and Evolution
• Lascaux: La Vie en Caverne!