Quotes About Artifacts

We are like the whales that live in the sea, he said, civilizations without artifacts, living between stone and sky in our islands in the northern oceans.

What I really love is modern political history. I love the research process, whether it's digging through old newspaper stories, artifacts from election campaigns or TV stories and being able to recreate moments in history that - when you look back at them now - you can get to that question of how did we get here.

If you work as a curator, as I do, at Hampton Court, you sometimes wonder if there might be more to life than Henry VIII.

Dash it, they've got no heads!' 'No, but you see, Freddy, they are so very old! They have been damaged.' explained Miss Charing. 'Damaged! I should rather think so! They haven't got any arms either! Well, if this don't beat the Dutch! And just look at this, Kit!' ' Birth of Athene from the brain of Zeus,' said Kitty, consulting the catalogue. 'Birth of Athene from what?

In the years that I worked in museums, first as a summer student and eventually as a curator, one of the primary lessons I learned was this: History is shaped by the people who seek to preserve it. We, of the present, decide what to keep, what to put on display, what to put into storage, and what to discard.

There are no memories, just artifacts. And they're all lying.

The museum may lose things," I said, "but it never throws them away.

Q: What is the definition of an archaeologist? A: A person whose career is in ruins.

Q: How do you embarrass an archaeologist? A: Give him a used tampon and ask him which period it came from.

If you're making a time capsule you have to throw my album in there.

Stories are artifacts, not really made things which we create and can take credit for, but pre-existing objects which we dig up.

Stories are found things, like fossils in the ground... Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered, pre-existing world.

Traces are marks, residues, or remnants left in place by cultural life.

The exhibition gobsmacked me. I'm not ashamed to admit it. Here was quite a small building, not many people about, getting little attention. And inside they'd pulled together a staggering display of Regency furniture. I've seen most of the stuff that matters. I simply stood there, gaping.

A CD. How quaint. We have these in museums.

We might laugh at the notion of plastic tea sets in the jungle, but it is a time-honored ritual for Western travelers to collect preindustrial artifacts to use as home decorations...Possession of primitive artifacts suggests worldly knowledge, just as in the highland communities of Borneo an electronic wristwatch that plays "Happy Birthday" is the mark of a great traveler. Funny thing how travel can narrow the mind.

Designed in the neoclassical style by Marcel Dourgnon, the dusky-rose-colored Egyptian Museum of Antiquities, at Tahrir Square, was the first purpose-built museum edifice in the world. In 1902, the thousands of artifact treasures, spanning five thousand years of Egyptian dynastic history, were transferred there from the palace of Ismail Pasha in Giza, where they had been displayed for more than a decade. Bourne

But when you see personal artifacts relating to - by genealogy at least - a living human being, it was just more impressive to me than just about anything I've ever read about slavery before.

I have brought many artifacts back with me from the steppe. My favourite is a 90-year-old Kazakh saddle decorated with silverwork in traditional motifs. It symbolises the deep relationship between man and horse on the Eurasian Steppe.

The so-called 'Sleeping Lady' statues found in the Hypogeum and numerous 'Venus' figurines found throughout Malta's megalithic temples leave little doubt that a form of Mother Goddess was the supreme deity worshipped in these mysterious places. But these artifacts 'have all been attributed arbitrarily to the Neolithic', even though they are distinctly characteristic of European Palaeolithic art forms, dating as far back at 30,000 BP.

We wouldn't expect to gather crucial information about modern cultures from their knives, forks, hammers, and screwdrivers, so why should we suddenly set different standards when we try to understand the ancient world?

We were not then powerful enough to erase all evidence of the Precursors, to destroy their star roads and citadels and other artifacts. And so we left at least one Precursor behind, to live out dreams of vengeance and hatred, to lay down plans in cold and darkness at the heart of a lost asteroid—over millions of years.

Of all the human figurines discovered so far from 30,000-3,000BC, 92% are of the female form. This is not to say there was any kind of matriarchy or worship of a mother goddess - far from it - but women are conspicuous by their presence.

The most awful museums are in China. They have magnificent stuff on display and just the worst way of displaying it. They just don't spend money on lighting and installation.