The Navajo Nation has never allowed the film crew to enter the magnificent red canyon known as Death Canyon. On tribal land in northeastern Arizona, it is part of the Cheli Canyon National Monument-the place where the Navajo self-proclaimed Diné has the highest spiritual and historical significance. Coerte Voorhees, the screenwriter and director of the film shot here, described the interconnected canyons as “the heart of the Navajo Nation.”
The film is an archaeological epic called Canyon Del Muerto, which is expected to be released later this year. It tells the story of pioneer archaeologist Ann Akstel Mo who worked here in the 1920s and early 1930s The true story of Ann Axtell Morris. She is married to Earl Morris and is sometimes described as the father of Southwestern Archaeology and is often cited as a model for the fictional Indiana Jones, Harrison Ford in the blockbuster Steven Spielberg and George Lucas movies Play. The praise of Earl Morris, combined with the prejudice of women in the discipline, has long obscured her achievements, even though she was one of the first female wild archaeologists in the United States.
On a cold and sunny morning, when the sun began to illuminate the towering canyon walls, a team of horses and four-wheel drive vehicles drove along the bottom of the sandy canyon. Most of the 35-person film crew rode in an open jeep driven by a local Navajo guide. They pointed out the rock art and cliff dwellings built by the Anasazi or archaeologists now known as the ancestral Pueblo people. The ancients who lived here before BC. Navajo, and left in mysterious circumstances in the early 14th century. At the rear of the convoy, often stuck in the sand are a 1917 Ford T and a 1918 TT truck.
While preparing the camera for the first wide-angle lens in the canyon, I walked up to Ann Earl’s 58-year-old grandson Ben Gail, who was the senior scripting consultant for the production. “This is the most special place for Ann, where she is the happiest and has done some of her most important work,” Gell said. “She went back to the canyon many times and wrote that it never looked the same twice. The light, the season, and the weather always change. My mother was actually conceived here during archaeological excavations, perhaps unsurprisingly, She grew up to become an archaeologist.”
In a scene, we watched a young woman walking slowly past the camera on a white mare. She was wearing a brown leather jacket lined with sheepskin and her hair tied back in a knot. The actress who plays his grandmother in this scene is the stunt stand-in Kristina Krell (Kristina Krell), for Gail, it’s like watching an old family photo come to life. “I don’t know Ann or Earl, they both died before I was born, but I realized how much I love them,” Gale said. “They are amazing people, they have a kind heart.”
Also under observation and filming was John Tsosie from Diné near Chinle, Arizona. He is the liaison between the film production and the tribal government. I asked him why Diné agreed to let these filmmakers into Canyon del Muerto. “In the past, making movies on our land, we had some bad experiences,” he said. “They brought in hundreds of people, left trash, disturbed the holy place, and acted as if they owned this place. This work is just the opposite. They respect our land and people very much. They hire a lot of Navajo , Invested funds in local businesses and helped our economy.”
Gale added, “The same is true for Ann and Earl. They were the first archaeologists to hire Navajo for excavation, and they were well paid. Earl speaks Navajo, and Ann speaks too. Some. Later, when Earle advocated protecting these canyons, he said that the Navajo people who lived here should be allowed to stay because they are an important part of this place.”
This argument prevailed. Today, approximately 80 Diné families live in Death Canyon and Cheri Canyon within the boundaries of the National Monument. Some of the drivers and riders who worked in the movie belong to these families, and they are descendants of people Ann and Earl Morris knew nearly 100 years ago. In the movie, Ann and Earl’s Navajo assistant is played by the Diné actor, speaking Navajo with English subtitles. “Usually,” Tsosie said, “filmmakers don’t care which tribe the Native American actors belong to or what language they speak.”
In the film, the 40-year-old Navajo language consultant has a short stature and a ponytail. Sheldon Blackhorse played a YouTube clip on his smartphone-this is the 1964 Western movie “The Faraway Trumpet” A scene in “. A Navajo actor dressed as a Plains Indian is talking to an American cavalry officer in Navajo. The filmmaker did not realize that the actor was teasing himself and the other Navajo. “Obviously you can’t do anything to me,” he said. “You are a snake that crawls over yourself-a snake.”
In Canyon Del Muerto, Navajo actors speak a language version suitable for the 1920s. Sheldon’s father, Taft Blackhorse, was the language, culture and archaeology consultant on the scene that day. He explained: “Since Ann Morris came here, we have been exposed to Anglo culture for another century and our language has become As straightforward and direct as English.. The ancient Navajo is more descriptive in the landscape. They would say, “Walk on the living rock. “Now we say, “Walking on the rock.” This movie will retain the old way of speaking that has almost disappeared.”
The team moved up the canyon. The staff unpacked the cameras and installed them on the high stand, preparing for the arrival of the Model T. The sky is blue, the walls of the canyon are ocher red, and the poplar leaves grow bright green. Voorhees is 30 years old this year, slim, with brown curly hair and hooked features, wearing shorts, a T-shirt and a wide-brimmed straw hat. He paced back and forth on the beach. “I can’t believe we are really here,” he said.
This is the culmination of many years of hard work by writers, directors, producers and entrepreneurs. With the help of his brother John and his parents, Voorhees raised millions of dollars in production budgets from more than 75 individual equity investors, selling them one at a time. Then came the Covid-19 pandemic, which delayed the entire project and asked Voorhees to raise an additional US$1 million to cover the cost of personal protective equipment (masks, disposable gloves, hand sanitizer, etc.), which need to protect dozens of In the 34-day filming plan, all the actors and staff of the set.
Voorhees consulted more than 30 archaeologists to ensure accuracy and cultural sensitivity. He made 22 reconnaissance trips to Canyon de Chelly and Canyon del Muerto to find the best location and shooting angle. For several years, he has held meetings with the Navajo Nation and National Park Service, and they jointly manage the Canyon Decelli National Monument.
Voorhees grew up in Boulder, Colorado, and his father was a lawyer. During most of his childhood, inspired by Indiana Jones movies, he wanted to become an archaeologist. Then he became interested in filmmaking. At the age of 12, he began to volunteer at the museum on the campus of the University of Colorado. This museum was the alma mater of Earl Morris and sponsored some of his research expeditions. A photo in the museum caught the attention of the young Voorhees. “This is a black and white photo of Earl Morris in Canyon de Chelly. It looks like Indiana Jones in this incredible landscape. I I thought,’Wow, I want to make a movie about that person.’ Then I found out that he was the prototype of Indiana Jones, or maybe, I was totally fascinated.”
Lucas and Spielberg have stated that the role of Indiana Jones is based on a genre commonly seen in the 1930s film series-what Lucas called “the lucky soldier in a leather jacket and that kind of hat”-and Not any historical figure. However, in other statements, they admitted that they were partly inspired by two real-life models: the demure, champagne-drinking archaeologist Sylvanus Morley oversees Mexico The study of the great Mayan temple group Chichén Itzá, and Molly’s director of excavation, Earl Morris, wearing a fedora and brown leather jacket, combined the rugged spirit of adventure and rigorous knowledge Combine.
The desire to make a film about Earl Morris has been accompanied by Voorhees through high school and Georgetown University, where he studied history and classics, and the Graduate School of Film at the University of Southern California. The first feature film “First Line” released by Netflix in 2016 was adapted from Elgin Marbles’s court battle, and he seriously turned to the theme of Earl Morris.
Voorhees’ touchstone texts soon became two books written by Ann Morris: “Excavating in the Yucatan Peninsula” (1931), which covers her and Earl’s time in Chichén Itzá (Chichén Itzá) The time passed, and “Digging in the Southwest” (1933), tells about their experiences in the four corners and especially Canyon del Muerto. Among those lively autobiographical works—because publishers do not accept that women can write a book on archaeology for adults, so they are sold to older children—Morris defines this profession as “sending to the earth” A rescue expedition in a distant place to restore the scattered pages of autobiography.” After concentrating on her writing, Voorhees decided to focus on Ann. “It was her voice in those books. I started writing the script.”
That voice is informative and authoritative, but also lively and humorous. Regarding her love of the remote canyon landscape, she wrote in the excavation in the southwest region, “I admit that I am one of the countless victims of acute hypnosis in the southwest region-this is a chronic, fatal and incurable disease.”
In “Excavation in Yucatan”, she described the three “absolutely necessary tools” of archaeologists, namely the shovel, the human eye, and the imagination-these are the most important tools and the tools that are most easily abused. . “It must be carefully controlled by the available facts while maintaining sufficient fluidity to change and adapt as new facts are exposed. It must be governed by rigorous logic and good common sense, and… The measurement of the drug of life is carried out under the care of a chemist.”
She wrote that without imagination, the relics excavated by archaeologists were “only dry bones and variegated dust.” Imagination allowed them to “rebuild the walls of collapsed cities…Imagine the great trade roads all over the world, full of curious travelers, greedy merchants and soldiers, who are now completely forgotten for great victory or defeat.”
When Voorhees asked Ann at the University of Colorado in Boulder, he often heard the same answer-with so many words, why would anyone care about Earl Morris’ drunk wife? Although Ann did become a serious alcoholic in his later years, this cruel dismissive issue also reveals the extent to which Ann Morris’ career has been forgotten, ignored, or even obliterated.
Inga Calvin, a professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado, has been writing a book about Ann Morris, mainly based on her letters. “She is indeed an excellent archaeologist with a university degree and field training in France, but because she is a female, she is not taken seriously,” she said. “She is a young, beautiful, lively woman who likes to make people happy. It doesn’t help. She popularizes archaeology through books, and it doesn’t help. Serious academic archaeologists despise popularizers. This is a girl’s thing for them.”
Calvin thinks Morris is “underrated and very remarkable.” In the early 1920s, Ann’s style of dressing in the fields—walking in breeches, leggings, and menswear in strides—was radical for women. “In an extremely remote place, sleeping in a camp full of men waving a spatula, including Native American men, is the same,” she said.
According to Mary Ann Levine, an anthropology professor at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania, Morris was a “pioneer, colonizing uninhabited places.” As institutional gender discrimination hindered the path of academic research, she found a suitable job in a professional couple with Earle, wrote most of his technical reports, helped him explain their findings, and wrote successful books. “She introduced the methods and goals of archaeology to the avid public, including young women,” Levine said. “When telling her story, she wrote herself into the history of American archaeology.”
When Ann arrived in Chichen Itza, Yucatan, in 1924, Silvanas Molly told her to take care of his 6-year-old daughter and act as the hostess of the visitors. In order to escape these duties and explore the site, she found a neglected small temple. She convinced Molly to let her dig it, and she carefully digged it. When Earl restored the magnificent Temple of the Warriors (800-1050 AD), the highly skilled painter Ann was copying and studying its murals. Her research and illustrations are an important part of the two-volume version of the Temple of the Warriors in Chichen Itza, Yucatan, published by the Carnegie Institute in 1931. Together with Earl and French painter Jean Charlotte, she is considered to be Co-author.
In the southwestern United States, Ann and Earl carried out extensive excavations and recorded and studied petroglyphs in the four corner areas. Her book on these efforts overturned Anasazi’s traditional view. As Voorhees puts it, “People think that this part of the country has always been nomadic hunter-gatherers. The Anasazis are not thought to have civilization, cities, culture, and civic centers. What Ann Morris did in that book Very finely decomposed and determined all the independent periods of the 1000-year civilization-Basket Makers 1, 2, 3, 4; Pueblo 3, 4, etc.”
Voorhees sees her as a 21st century woman stranded in the early 20th century. “In her life, she was neglected, patronized, ridiculed and deliberately obstructed, because archeology is a boys’ club,” he said. “The classic example is her books. They are clearly written for adults with college degrees, but they must be published as children’s books.”
Voorhees asked Tom Felton (best known for playing Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies) to play Earl Morris. The film producer Ann Morris (Ann Morris) plays Abigail Lawrie, the 24-year-old Scottish-born actress is famous for the British TV crime drama “Tin Star”, and the young Of archaeologists have striking physical similarities. “It’s like we reincarnated Ann,” Voorhees said. “It’s incredible when you meet her.”
On the third day of the canyon, Voorhees and staff arrived in an area where Ann slipped and nearly died while climbing a rock, where she and Earle made some of the most notable discoveries-as pioneering archeology The home entered a cave called the Holocaust, high up near the edge of the canyon, invisible from below.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, there were frequent violent attacks, counterattacks, and wars between Navajo and Spaniards in New Mexico. In 1805, Spanish soldiers rode into the canyon to avenge the recent Navajo invasion. Approximately 25 Navajos—the elderly, women, and children—hidden in the cave. If it hadn’t been for an old woman who started taunting the soldiers, saying that they were “people who walked without eyes”, they would have been hiding.
The Spanish soldiers could not shoot their target directly, but their bullets ejected from the cave wall, wounding or killing most of the people inside. Then the soldiers climbed up the cave, slaughtered the wounded and stole their belongings. Nearly 120 years later, Ann and Earl Morris entered the cave and found whitish skeletons, bullets that killed the Navajo, and pitted spots all over the back wall. The massacre gave Death Canyon the evil name. (Smithsonian Institution geologist James Stevenson led an expedition here in 1882 and named the canyon.)
Taft Blackhorse said: “We have a very strong taboo against the dead. We don’t talk about them. We don’t like to stay where people die. If someone dies, people tend to abandon the house. The soul of the dead will hurt the living, so we People also stay away from killing caves and cliff dwellings.” Navajo’s death taboo may be one of the reasons why Canyon of the Dead was basically unaffected before Ann and Earl Morris arrived. She literally described it as “one of the richest archaeological sites in the world.”
Not far from the Holocaust Cave is a spectacular and beautiful place called the Mummy Cave: This is the most exciting first time Voorhees appears on the screen. This is a double-layered cave of wind-eroded red sandstone. On the side 200 feet above the ground of the canyon is an amazing three-story tower with several adjacent rooms, all built with masonry by the Anasazi or ancestor Pueblo people.
In 1923, Ann and Earl Morris excavated here and found evidence of the 1,000-year occupation, including many mummified corpses with hair and skin still intact. Almost every mummy—man, woman, and child—wore shells and beads; so did the pet eagle at the funeral.
One of Ann’s tasks is to remove the filth of the mummies over the centuries and remove the nesting mice from their abdominal cavity. She is not squeamish at all. Ann and Earl have just gotten married, and this is their honeymoon.
In Ben Gell’s small adobe house in Tucson, in the mess of southwestern handicrafts and old-fashioned Danish high-fidelity audio equipment, there are a large number of letters, diaries, photos and souvenirs from his grandmother. He took out a revolver from his bedroom, which the Morriss carried with them during the expedition. At the age of 15, Earl Morris pointed at the man who murdered his father after an argument in a car in Farmington, New Mexico. “Earl’s hands trembled so much that he could barely hold the pistol,” Gale said. “When he pulled the trigger, the gun did not fire and he ran away in a panic.”
Earle was born in Chama, New Mexico in 1889. He grew up with his father, a truck driver and construction engineer who worked on road leveling, dam construction, mining and railway projects. In their spare time, the father and son searched for Native American relics; Earle used a shortened draft pick to dig out his first pot at the age of 31/2. After his father was murdered, the excavation of artifacts became Earl’s OCD treatment. In 1908, he entered the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he earned a master’s degree in psychology, but was fascinated by archaeology—not only digging for pots and treasures, but also for knowledge and understanding of the past. In 1912, he excavated Mayan ruins in Guatemala. In 1917, at the age of 28, he began to excavate and restore the Aztec ruins of the Pueblo ancestors in New Mexico for the American Museum of Natural History.
Ann was born in 1900 and grew up in a wealthy family in Omaha. At the age of 6, as she mentioned in “Southwest Digging”, a family friend asked her what she wanted to do when she grew up. Just as she described herself, dignified and precocious, she gave a well-rehearsed answer, which is an accurate prediction of her adult life: “I want to dig out the buried treasure, explore among the Indians, paint and wear Go to the gun and then go to college.”
Gal has been reading the letters Ann wrote to her mother at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. “A professor said she was the smartest girl in Smith College,” Gale told me. “She is the life of the party, very humorous, maybe hidden behind it. She keeps using humor in her letters and tells her mother everything, including the days when she can’t get up. Depressed? Hangover? Maybe both. Yes, we really don’t know.”
Ann is fascinated by early humans, ancient history, and Native American society before the European conquest. She complained to her history professor that all their courses started too late and that civilization and government had been established. “It wasn’t until a professor I was harassed wearily commented that I might want archaeology rather than history, that dawn did not begin,” she wrote. After graduating from Smith College in 1922, she sailed directly to France to join the American Academy of Prehistoric Archaeology, where she received field excavation training.
Although she had previously met Earl Morris in Shiprock, New Mexico—she was visiting a cousin—the chronological order of the courtship was unclear. But it seems that Earl sent a letter to Ann when he was studying in France, asking her to marry him. “He was completely fascinated by her,” Gale said. “She married her hero. This is also a way for her to become an archaeologist-to enter the industry.” In a letter to her family in 1921, she said that if she were a man, Earl would He would be happy to offer her a job in charge of excavation, but his sponsor would never allow a woman to hold this position. She wrote: “Needless to say, my teeth have wrinkled due to repeated grinding.”
The wedding took place in Gallup, New Mexico in 1923. Then, after honeymoon excavation in the Mummy Cave, they took a boat to Yucatan, where the Carnegie Institute hired the Earl to excavate and rebuild the Warrior Temple in Chichen Itza. On the kitchen table, Gail placed Photos of his grandparents in the Mayan ruins-Ann is wearing a sloppy hat and white shirt, copying murals; the earl hangs the cement mixer on the drive shaft of the truck; and she is in the small temple of Xtoloc Cenote. There “earned her spurs” as an excavator, she wrote in the excavation in Yucatan.
For the rest of the 1920s, the Morris family lived a nomadic life, dividing their time between Yucatan and the Southwestern United States. From the facial expressions and body language shown in Ann’s photos, as well as the lively and uplifting prose in her books, letters and diaries, it is clear that she is taking a great physical and intellectual adventure with a man she admires. According to Inga Calvin, Ann is drinking alcohol—not uncommon for a field archaeologist—but still works and enjoys her life.
Then, at some point in the 1930s, this smart, energetic woman became a hermit. “This is the central mystery in her life, and my family didn’t talk about it,” Gale said. “When I asked my mother about Ann, she would say truthfully,’She is an alcoholic,’ and then change the subject. I don’t deny that Ann is an alcoholic — she must be — but I think this explanation is too simplistic NS.”
Gale wanted to know if the settlement and childbirth in Boulder, Colorado (his mother Elizabeth Ann was born in 1932 and Sarah Lane was born in 1933) was a difficult transition after those adventurous years at the forefront of archaeology . Inga Calvin bluntly said: “That is hell. For Ann and her children, they are afraid of her.” However, there are also stories about Ann holding a costume party for the children in Boulder’s house.
When she was 40, she rarely left the room upstairs. According to one family, she would go downstairs twice a year to visit her children, and her room was strictly forbidden. There were syringes and Bunsen burners in that room, which made some family members guess that she was using morphine or heroin. Gail didn’t think it was true. Ann has diabetes and is injecting insulin. He said that maybe the Bunsen burner is used to heat coffee or tea.
“I think this is a combination of multiple factors,” he said. “She is drunk, diabetic, severe arthritis, and almost certainly suffering from depression.” At the end of her life, Earl wrote a letter to Ann’s father about what the doctor had done X The light examination revealed white nodules, “like the tail of a comet entwining her spine”. Gale assumed that the nodule was a tumor and the pain was severe.
Coerte Voorhees wanted to shoot all of his Canyon de Chelly and Canyon del Muerto scenes in real locations in Arizona, but for financial reasons he had to shoot most of the scenes elsewhere. The state of New Mexico, where he and his team are located, provides generous tax incentives for film production in the state, while Arizona does not provide any incentives.
This means that a stand-in for the Canyon Decelli National Monument must be found in New Mexico. After extensive reconnaissance, he decided to shoot in Red Rock Park on the outskirts of Gallup. The scale of the landscape is much smaller, but it is made of the same red sandstone, eroded into a similar shape by the wind, and contrary to popular belief, the camera is a good liar.
In Hongyan, the staff worked with uncooperative horses in the wind and rain until late at night, and the wind turned into oblique snow. It’s noon, the snowflakes are still raging in the high desert, and Laurie-really a living image of Ann Morris-is rehearsing her with Taft Blackhorse and his son Sheldon Navajo lines.
Post time: Sep-09-2021