Langdon Warner (1881–1955) was an American archaeologist and art historian specializing in East Asian art. He was a professor at Harvard and the Curator of Oriental Art at Harvard’s Fogg Museum. He is reputed to be one of the models for Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones. As an explorer/agent at the turn of the 20th century, he studied the Silk Road. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1927. Career Warner graduated from Harvard College in 1903 with a specialty in Buddhist art and an interest in archeology. After several field trips to Asia, he returned to Harvard, where he taught the university's first courses in Japanese and Chinese art. The Smithsonian Institution sent him to Asia in 1913, and he spent more than a year there, but World War I interrupted his work. In 1922 the Fogg Museum again sent him to China. Frescoes at Dunhuang and controversy over the removal of antiquities Langdon Warner's work in China is the subject of much controversy among art historians. On the one side, there are those who say that he pillaged sites in Asia of their art, in particular, frescos from the Mogao caves at Dunhuang. In 1922, the Fogg Museum sent Warner to China to explore western China. He arrived at the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang in January 1924 and, armed with a special chemical solution for detaching wall-paintings, he removed twenty-six Tang dynasty masterpieces from caves 335, 321, 323 & 320. Warner first applied the chemical solution (strong glue) to the painting on the cave wall. He then placed a cloth against it. The cloth was then pulled away from the fresco and then he applied plaster of Paris on the back of the painting and transferred the painting to the plaster surface. Warner had found evidence that the caves were the object of vandalism by Russian soldiers and reached an agreement with the local people to purchase the frescoes and remove them in order to save them for posterity. Unfortunately, the removal process resulted in some damage to the site itself. Luckily, frescoes he framed with glue but were unable to remove are still on display in the caves today. Only five of the 26 fragments of murals that he removed are in good enough condition to be exhibited now in the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts. The views of the Chinese