Was There A Real Indiana Jones?

a few have claimed to be,

 but my vote goes to Alfred Percival Maudslay, who was a British diplomat, archaeologist, and explorer who studied Maya ruins in the late 19th century,

  in other words, for me he was a real-life Indiana Jones, for 13 years, he traveled through Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, and Mexico identifying and trying his best to preserve the remains of the ancient Maya civilization,

 He pioneered the archaeological practice of working alongside plasterers, technicians and artists to make casts and impressions of the carvings and statues before their inevitable disturbance that would see them end up on display in museums around the world, or worse, destroyed to make gravel fill for roads, yes that really happened!

  just a few years ago in 2015, an ancient Mayan pyramid in Belize that stood for 2300 years, constructed with hand-made limestone bricks, and once the center of a settlement of 40,000 people, was torn down and turned into gravel used to repair roads, the company responsible was only fined $24,000,

he was accompanied by his wife Annie, his first site was the Mayan ruins of Quirigua in Guatemala and Copan in Honduras, where he hired local laborers to clear the jungle surrounding the identified sites to survey ruins, a real husband and wife team,

 but best of all, Maudslay photographed his work on glass plates,

 because of this, ancient carvings that were eventually destroyed could be deciphered many years later, and he took pictures of not only the artifacts and the sites, 

but also the people who worked on them,

 whilst these images are from his discoveries,

 there are still lots more to be found, 

the world’s largest pyramid was only discovered as recently as 2009, covered by the canopy of the Mayan jungle, the ruin is part of a huge ancient Mayan city the size of downtown Los Angeles, “El Mirador” in Guatemala, and archaeologists say still thousands of pyramids yet to be uncovered, You can see what else they found in this CNN report, in 2011 3-D mapping revealed an ancient Mayan city under a Guatemalan rain forest, He made six expeditions in total and finally published his findings in 1902 in a 5 volume compendium, BiologiaCentrali-Americana, 

 it wasn’t until the 1980s however, the hieroglyphs in many of his photographs would be translated,

it was founds that the Glyphs represented not letters but syllables, only a handful of people are able to decipher them today, Alfred Percival Maudslay, for me the real life Indiana Jones.