Two days later, the archeologist Konrad Spindler noticed the unusual scraps gathered at the scene in a plastic bag: a piece of wood, taken from the body's right hand, and a four-inch-long copper blade.
There was no physical sign of any road at all, but I later discovered that archeologists had dug down 12 inches a couple of miles from here, and found the surface of the road intact – still showing the rut marks of wheels nearly 2,000 years old.
As the archeologist Betty Meggers later put it, the Amazon was a "counterfeit paradise".
Mr. Netzer began his archeological career in the 1960s as part of the dig of Masada led by Yigael Yadin, the country's best-known archeologist, who later went into politics.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade proved errantly monikered when Harrison Ford returned, almost two decades later, as the heroic archeologist in 2008's poorly received Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
A few years later, the French architect and archeologist Ernest Hébrard proposed the reconstruction of the city centre, but his plans were never fully implemented.
Other lecturers in the festival's educational "Speakers' Series" include a local wilderness entrepreneur who runs private tours of petroglyph sites that aren't on Naval land—"If you're interested, we can talk prices later," he tells the audience and an archeologist who also offers private tours.
When the archeologists called him fifteen days later to say that they had found Neolithic traces, Tansev thought they were joking.
Gutman, who forged the Masada ethos, and who later became one of Israel's leading archeologists, saw the revolutionary movement as a defiant display of vitality from a people on the verge of extinction.
