An American explorer and anthropologist whose travels took him all over the world and inspired parallels to Indiana Jones, the legendary movie hero, has passed away at the age of 94.
Born and raised in the Kansas City area, Jones is a native Kansan. Because their father supplied boots to Army bases for a living, his younger sister Sharon said that their brother had been to every state in the United States before he was in first grade.
He stated in his memoirs that he relocated to Paris following WWII and worked as a photographer there in an essay that was made available on the website of Edinburgh University. A further four years of his life were devoted to photography in Africa.
He lived through a helicopter accident in a marketplace in Salah, Algeria, in 1956. As soon as the chopper went down, he realized he was engulfed in flames; the strong winds had rekindled the embers from his pipe.
In his later years, he made his home in Greece, where he earned a living as a book translator. In 1958, he decided to travel by car through Nepal and India. During his time in Afghanistan, he discovered a passion for the country that would eventually lead him to study anthropology at Edinburgh University.
He went back to Afghanistan and started researching the indigenous people who lived in the far eastern regions of the nation after finishing college. He used his studies to get a PhD from Oxford University and then worked his way up the ranks to director of the Pitt Rivers Museum, which houses the research institution’s anthropological and archaeological artifacts. He was offered the award of Commander of the Order of the British Empire upon his retirement, which is one tier below knighthood.
Da’Luz Vieria-Manion’s mother, Lorraine, who passed away in 2011, was Jones’s second marriage after his first to Lis Margot Sondergaard Rasmussen.
Afterward, he started seeing actress Karla Burns, who tragically passed away in 2021.
He leaves behind a large family – a sister, three daughters, a son, six granddaughters, six great-grandchildren, and one great-great-grandchild.
