Indiana Jones’ adventures retraced by real-life archeologist — and now it’s his turn on silver screen

You gotta dig it.

An archeologist is on a mission to reveal the history behind Indiana Jones — and has found himself living out some of his Hollywood hero’s adventures in real life along the way.

Dr. David West Reynolds has spent the last two decades traveling the world to retrace the journey taken by the whip-cracking archeologist in “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and rediscovering the long-lost sets and locations where the 1981 blockbuster was filmed.

“I find the field is very uncomfortable with Indiana Jones as an ambassador,” the University of Michigan-educated archeologist told The Post. “I constantly hear from from the academics about how movies like ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark is disrespectful to history. And I want to show that’s not actually the full story.”

The Indiana native is now raising funds for a documentary.

“I want to show how that movie is just full of surprising accuracy,” he said. “And that adds up to respect for history. This documentary is about revealing a surprising real-life history and archeology behind ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark.’”

Reynolds’ journey to the documentary, “Chasing Raiders,” has taken him from humid jungles to scorching deserts to frigid arctic seas — but it started a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

In 1995 Reynolds was completing his PhD, but felt his dissertation wasn’t truly testing his mettle as a field archeologist, so he decided to prove to himself what he could do.

A bona fide “Star Wars” nerd, he got the idea to trace down the desert locations where the original 1977 movie had been filmed in North Africa — sites which had been completely lost to time, despite the movie’s enduring fame.

“Before GPS it was easy for locations to become lost,” Reynolds said “And if it was a wilderness location, those were hard to keep track of. There weren’t ordinance maps of the wilderness in Tunisia. In the 70s, the world still seemed infinite.”

Reynolds had little more than some Topps gum trading cards and photos he’d taken of ‘Star Wars’ scenes paused on a TV screen to work with, but he was able muster all his archeological skills — which included communicating with nomadic tribesmen who didn’t know what a movie was — to find the sets that had been lost for nearly two decades.

Deliberately armed with a GPS, Reynolds logged the coordinates then headed home, and “as an archeologist does” wrote up his findings — and published them in Star Wars Insider magazine.

“Star Wars” creator George Lucas was at the same time beginning work on the prequels and wanted to reuse some locations from his original movie, but his team realized they had no idea where they were. Until someone discovered Reynold’s article in Star Wars Insider.

“They learned that I was the only man in the world who had the coordinates of all those locations. They had to hire me as a location scout,” he said.

So Reynolds led Lucas and his team across North Africa, and the two hit it off so well that the director asked the archeologist to put his talents to work combing through the archives at Skywalker Ranch to build out a series of Star Wars reference books, The Visual Dictionaries, that became wildly successful.

It was during his years working on Skywalker Ranch that Reynolds — who had first been inspired to become an archeologist by watching the Lucas-written “Raiders of the Lost Ark” as a boy  — first got to handle the props used in the iconic film, and he was amazed by what he saw.

“I found out in the Lucasfilm archives that the Indy props from ‘Raiders’ were a whole different level of quality than you ordinarily find in a movie,” he said. “These were incredibly accurate pieces. Some of these pieces looked like they didn’t come from the British Museum. They did not look like movie props.

“A movie prop is not meant to look real to handle, it’s meant to look real on the screen,” he added. “But the Indiana Jones ‘Raiders’ props were remarkably well researched, they were museum quality.”

One such prop was the headpiece to the Staff of Ra that Jones uses to indicate the Ark’s hiding place in Tanis, which Reynolds found was inscribed with an obscure language that was period and regionally correct for the biblical ark story.

“They’re using middle Semitic script and it’s Aramaic, which is what the language of the Israelites would have been at that time the ark was stolen,” Reynolds said. “Which is such crazy insight, like, there’s a handful of scholars that will recognize that.”

And he kept turning up more, like the golden Idol Indy snatches from a Peruvian temple closely matched real sculptures of the Aztec deity Tlazolteotl. Throughout the movie, the ark behaved in subtle ways that matched stories from the Bible. Frescoes painted on the Egyptian set pieces contained real hieroglyphic messages.

The set pieces throughout the film even contained what Reynolds calls “quotations” from numerous real ancient sites, including the map room where Indiana uses light beaming through a temple wall to locate the ark — which mirrored the precise way the sun shines through the ancient Egyptian temple Abu Simbel.

“In ‘Raiders,’ so much is connected to authentic history and archeology that there is just one amazing story after another, and one surprise after another,” Reynolds said. “No matter how many times you have watched this movie, I will show you things that you’ve never seen before.”

But Reynolds wasn’t satisfied with just the Lucasfilm archives — he wanted to see the real places that Indiana Jones had his adventures, and walk in his fictional hero’s footsteps. So, as he did with his work on Star Wars, Reynolds set out across the world out to uncover another set of long-lost film sites.

Cobbling together funding where he could and seeking out archeology work that would take him near Indiana’s trail, Reynolds flew to the likes of Hawaii where he chartered a helicopter and spent days strafing the ragged volcanic peaks until he found the exact mountain the Paramount logo dissolves into at “Raiders” opening.

He found the field where Jones flees from a horde of angry natives and ran through it. He swung from a vine into the same lake where Jones evaded those tribesmen. In Africa he uncovered the ruins of an original set piece made of fiberglass and inscribed with hieroglyphs.

But Reynolds wanted to take it a step further. While “Raiders” wasn’t actually shot in Peru, he decided to ride horses through the mountains there and visit a temple that inspired the movie. He did the same in Egypt, hiking through the desert, walking through the markets of Cairo, and watching the sun move down the wall of Abu Simbel.

Along the way, Reynolds always brought one thing with him  — a bullwhip. The whip had been given to him as a gag gift from an uncle while he was getting his master’s degree, but he learned to pull off some tricks with it and he now claims he can crack a bottle out of someone’s hands.

“It started out as a joke. But then what I found was that by being good at this, in a little village in the Amazon or desert I would show up in, I would do some bullwhip tricks, and the kids would see that stuff, and they loved it. Well, now everybody in that village loved me,” Reynolds said.

“I never got hassled again,” he added. “I never got robbed again because I was the guy with the bullwhip. And it’s different than going in with a gun, if you travel with that it’s foolish, you’re asking for trouble in most cases. But the bullwhip meant you’re not going to go looking for trouble, but it does suggest trouble shouldn’t go looking for you.”

He claims on his travels in a Tunisian town someone tossed a small but very much live explosive. Trying to avoid a panic, he drew out his whip and cracked it in the air.

The street cleared and the situation was defused, he said — a scene that almost exactly resembles a moment from the first film where Jones is cornered by assassins in a Cairo square, and uses his whip to escape the tight spot.

“It was so unexpectedly useful that I ended up asking George about this. I said, ‘So did you have that in mind when you gave Indiana a whip?’ And he said, ‘As you can guess, Zorro had a whip, so I gave Indiana a whip, that’s all there was to it.’”

All those adventures, artifacts, and more — years of research and travel — are what Reynolds intends to share in his documentary, Chasing Raiders, which he’s in the process of raising $30,000 through a Kickstarter campaign to produce.

“This documentary is about revealing the surprising real-life history and archeology behind Indiana Jones. It focuses on ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark,’ because that movie’s got a respect for history and archeology that is just so unusual for Hollywood,” Reynolds said.

“Instead of finding all the flaws and saying ‘Here’s what it got wrong,’ I show how much it got right.’”