Schuyler Jones, a globe-trotting American adventurer whose exploits drew comparisons to iconic movie character Indiana Jones, has died. He was 94.
He wrote in an autobiography posted on Edinburgh University’s website that he moved to Paris after World War II, 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 In Salah, Algeria, the Wichita Eagle reported. After the helicopter crashed he discovered he was on fire; gale-force winds had reignited the ashes in his pipe.
“He was more interested in the people and cultures he was finding than he was in photography and selling those,” his son, archaeologist Peter Jones, told the Wichita Eagle. And like Indy, Schuyler 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.