Quotes About Artifacts

I love museums more than any other institution the human race has invented. Museum people are always overworked and underpaid, and they all deserve sainthood, every one.

American archaeology has always attracted lots of amateurs ... They were digging up Indian pottery all over the place.

Engineers use knowledge primarily to design, produce, and operate artifacts. ... Scientists, by contrast, use knowledge primarily to generate more knowledge.

The subject-matter of Archaeology is threefold-the Oral, the Written and the Monumental.

If there are frightful monsters in fairy tales, they do not frighten you now, because that kind of monster is no longer going about the world, whatever he may have done long, long ago. He has been turned into stone, and you may see his remains in museums.

Our history is a material history, not just a succession of thoughts or speech acts.

I went to the museum where they had all the heads and arms from the statues that are in all the other museums.

I'm a shopaholic when I travel. I have a large collection of artifacts from all over the world at my house, some of which I keep in drawers until I find a place to display them.

In archaeology, context is everything. Objects allow us to reconstruct the past. Taking artifacts from a temple or an ancient private house is like emptying out a time capsule.

ancestors.… If these things are lost or broken or destroyed, we lose a valuable part of our knowledge about our forefathers. No age lives entirely alone; every civilisation is formed not merely by its own achievements but by what it has inherited from the past. If these things are destroyed, we have lost a part of our past, and we shall be the poorer for it. —British Monuments Man Ronald Balfour, draft lecture for soldiers, 1944 All

To safeguard these things will not affect the course of battles, but it will affect the relations of invading armies with those peoples and [their] governments.…

Non mi sono mai reso conto di che cosa significasse combattere in un museo finché non ho messo piede in Italia. - Kesselring

Stages of life are artifacts. Adolescence is a useful contrivance, midlife is a moving target, senior citizens are an interest group, and tweenhood is just plain made up.

Archaeology holds all the keys to understanding who we are and where we come from.

The World of Massage Museum,

4 The Culture of Do and Tell The main inhibitor of Humble Inquiry is the culture in which we grew up. Culture can be thought of as manifesting itself on many levels—it is represented by all of its artifacts, by which I mean buildings, art works, products, language, and everything that we see and feel when we enter another culture.

archaeological riddles

It's a bit naff, but there is something exciting about pulling a bit of pottery out of the ground that's 2,000 years old.

Writers are naturally obsessed with books, the tangible artifacts of their labor. Even beyond the text, I love the physicality of books, the possibilities presented by their substance and form.

Objects let you tell a narrative that encompasses everybody. Texts don't.

The history of the Jews has been written overwhelmingly by scholars of texts - understandably given the formative nature of the Bible and the Talmud. Seeing Jewish history through artifacts, architecture and images is still a young but spectacularly flourishing discipline that's changing the whole story.

My appearances are almost theatrical performances. I bring items for the children to see, such as photographs and actual piece of meteorite, a family quilt, sometimes spectacles, sometimes clothing, so that they can understand what I write about is family stories based in fact.

As a species, we tend to live in environments where our own artifacts dominate. The way we shape our environment and are in turn shaped by it is a key theme in my fiction - indeed, it's a key part of a great deal of science fiction.

Objects recovered have been identified as 'Egyptian, Nubian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Cypriot, Mycenaean, Italian, Balkan, and Baltic