Page 27 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 94, No. 3 Spring 2014

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Jones
Was Rodney Young ’25 the real Indiana Jones? To
those who knew the prominent scholar during the
quarter-century he presided over the Archaeology
Department at the University of Pennsylvania, it
sounds like a stretch.
But according to a new volume by Susan Heuck
Allen, a classical archaeologist and recent visiting
scholar at Brown University who has also shared her
theories in a Rodney S. Young Memorial Lecture at
Penn, Young’s past was straight out of the pages of a
Robert Ludlum thriller. In Classical Spies: American
Archaeologists with the OSS in World War II Greece,
Young cuts a figure on par with Jason Bourne – or
Bourne’s boss.
Young’s postwar career is well-known and lauded.
From 1948 until his death in 1974, he was chair of
Penn’s Archaeology Department and the curator
of the Museum’s Mediterranean section. He also
earned international acclaim for directing the
Penn Museum’s 24-year-long excavation at Gordion
in Turkey.
In a note to Form Agent Henry Wilmerding ’25
published in the Spring 1950 issue of Alumni Horae,
Dr. Young wrote of his archeological expedition with
Penn, “I won’t be with you at our 25th Reunion as
I’ll be digging up Turkey until late July or August.”
“Gordion is the largest, longest-running archae-
ological project in Penn’s history,” says Gareth
Darbyshire, the Gordion archivist at the Penn
Museum. “Dr. Young and his staff excavated more
than 200 pieces [of] early Iron Age pottery, some of
which transformed our understanding of the evolu-
tion of the alphabet. And he found the tombs of
kings, including what may have been King Midas’s.”
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