Bullwhips.

The Holy Grail.

The Ark of the Covenant.

These are the big screen images of the adventurous world in which the archaeologist dwells.

While Harrison Ford and the multi-million dollar Indiana Jones saga have glorified archaeology as a pursuit of mild-mannered archaeologists say their jobs are often fairly pedestrian.

With a few life-threatening exceptions that is.

"On several occasions I have shot mamba, which are the most poisonous snakes around. The snakes are extremely fast," says Clay Professor of Archaeology Nicolaas J. van der Merwe. He encountered the snakes while surveying a South African game reserve for possible Iron Age vilage sites.

"It's a hell of a shock running into the big black mambas that are 12 feet [long]," he says. "The ones I shot were in fact usually right around where we lived, like in the house."

But braving the dangers of idyllic savannahs in search of ancient villages is only one part of archaeological field work, scholars say. In between the thrills are hours and hours of field work--digging, sifting, sorting and collecting.

"The whole process can be tedious and boring, but if you keep in mind this is the only way you can find out what happened in the past, it's exciting," says Professor of Anthropology Ofer Bar-Yosef.

Not only boring, but sometimes futile, says Assistant Professor of Fine Arts Hung Wu. "In China, I went to dig some tombs, so we spent 20 days going layer by layer by layer [of dirt]."

"That kind of excitement becomes heightened in the process. The use of different tools--at the beginning you can use a spade," he says. "Finally, you have to use your fingers. You don't want to destroy anything.[In the end] we found nothing."

Harvard archaelogists--who are drawn from a number of departments but come together under an umbrella committee--say that the monotony of field work is more than made up for by the joy of fitting together the pieces of an ancient puzzle.

"It's exciting because you feel like you are digging in the dirt of one of the earliest villages ever known," says Bar-Yosef, who has excavated some of the oldest sites in Israel.

Bar-Yosef says that the study of archaelogy can give the scientist an almost superhuman perspective on the course of history. The ability to analyze changes that span generations is a powerful one, he says.