The most famous archaeologist in film is named after a dog. George Lucas owned an Alaskan Malamute called Indiana, and the hero took the dog's name.
The same dog had already left a mark on cinema. Mental Floss and Looper both report that the big, hairy Malamute was the inspiration for Chewbacca in Star Wars.
The character took shape over several years. Lucas conceived the film in 1973, drawing on his own interest in archaeology. He and the director Philip Kaufman then worked on the story for about two weeks. Kaufman suggested the Ark of the Covenant, playing off Hitler's fascination with the occult, and kept a story credit on the finished film. In May 1977, on holiday in Hawaii, Lucas pitched the idea to Steven Spielberg.
At that stage the project was The Adventures of Indiana Smith. Spielberg objected, Mental Floss says, because it sounded too close to Nevada Smith, a 1966 Steve McQueen western. They wanted a surname as plain as Smith, and Lucas suggested Jones.
Lucas tried to give the first name a reason. Looper, citing a brainstorming transcript published by The New Yorker, quotes him: "It has to be unique. It's a character. Very Americana. Square. He was born in Indiana." Looper's conclusion is blunter. He simply named the character after his dog.
The films later turned the joke into plot. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade reveals that Indy's real name is Henry Walton Jones Jr., and that he took his nickname from the family dog. The private reference became official backstory.
The dog's name has its own history. Indiana's state historians say the word was coined around 1768 for a tract of land the Six Nations reserved for a Philadelphia company. The proprietors added the ending -a, signifying land, to Indian. That claim collapsed by 1798, and Congress reused the name in 1800 for the western part of the Northwest Territory.
So the name runs from a land company to a state, then to a dog, then to a man in a fedora.