SPANISH FORT, Ala. — As one of the greatest fictional archaeologists of all time told movie buffs more than 20 years ago, the field has very little to do with lost cities, exotic travel and digging up the world.

“We do not follow maps to buried treasure, and ‘X’ never, ever marks the spot,” quipped Indiana Jones in “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

Philip Carr Ph.D. said although the adage still holds true, the study of past cultures and their impact on current life doesn’t have to be full of high-speed chases and poison darts to keep an audience captivated.

Carr, who serves as an associate professor at the University of South Alabama and as associate director of USA’s Center for Archaeological Studies, will address this very topic at 2 p.m. Sunday, March 13, in the Tensaw Theater at 5 Rivers Delta Resource Center on Battleship Parkway in Spanish Fort.

5 Rivers educator Kellie Dorie said Carr’s free lecture will provide an overview of archaeology while weaving in specific examples of local and regional prehistoric sites.

“Archaeology is not about finding treasure; it’s not always about far-away places like Egypt or Greece or Turkey; and it doesn’t involve any dinosaurs,” Carr said, laying out the basics.

What archaeology is, he said, is actually much more interesting and relevant because clues to how humans relate to each other and how they relate to the planet can be found just as easily right here in south Alabama as anywhere else.

So, before you toss great-aunt Martha’s knock-off china into the dumpster you might want to consider who could be scouring it hundreds or thousands of years from now for clues into how you lived your own life.

“Mainly, we work with people’s trash, and our goal isn’t simply to fill museums with curios, though that does happen in the process. Archaeology is about teaching people something about life in the past,” Carr said. “It’s the everyday stuff that really gives you that insight into what people did and how they made a living.

And southeast Alabama actually offers a figurative treasure trove in addition to the stunning funds that rediscover the light of day on occasion, he said.

“We have a rich archaeological record here in Alabama that tells a story of a long occupation by prehistoric peoples, and that that record is fragile, non-renewable resource of its own,” Carr said. “Once the shell midden sites that were once so prevalent are gone, we can’t get them back. Whether they’re destroyed by hurricanes or new condominium developments, it doesn’t matter. They’re still gone, so there’s a need to protect that record because it is something of value to us and something that should be celebrated.”

Cast the net a little broader than Alabama, though, and the story gets even better, Carr said, because there is documented evidence of Paleo Indian populations roaming the region as far back as 14,000 years ago toward the end of the last Ice Age.

As a result, archaeology has provided a fairly clear record of how those inhabitants’ lives “changed in major ways” prior to European contact thousands of years later.

What began as a migrant hunter-gatherer population shifted with the changing environment as the Ice Age waned, and then major cultural changes were adopted when the people began putting down roots, both literally and figuratively.

“They went from living a very simple life where they moved around seasonally and exploited different resources available to living in settled villages, building mounds and developing characteristics of a more complex society in terms of political systems and so forth,” Carr said.

But how exactly does understanding the past decode the present and, sometimes, assist with anticipating the future?

“Archaeology is the only way we can look at long-term cultural changes,” Carr said. “At best, history goes back about 5,000 years and gives us names and dates and battles, but how did those people deal with changing environments and adapt. Archaeology helps us create a record of those long-term adaptations and cultural changes that happened right here in Alabama that we can then compare to other parts of the world.”