Quotes About Archaeology

Scholars make things very easy for themselves. They stick a couple of old potsherds together, search for one or two adjacent cultures, stick a label on the restored find and—hey, presto!—once again everything fits splendidly into the approved pattern of thought.

Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid, by Charles Piazzi Smith, published in 1864,

Even in the 1980s your average young archaeologist would have had difficulty raising capital for a house. I knew this because it's one of the things archaeologists will tell you about, at length, at the slightest provocation.

Most archaeology in London these days is rescue archaeology – projects designed to preserve as much as possible from the relentless cash-driven redevelopment. It's not a new problem. Ask a medievalist about Victorian cellars or an Iron Age specialist about medieval ploughing – but take snacks, because you're going to be there for a while.

When talking about writing, I often use the analogy of archaeology. There are these great tunes all around. Your skill as a musician allows you to pick them out without breaking them.

I'm not an academic; I'm not an archaeologist. I'm a writer, communicating ideas to the public. There is a model of how the past is, and a lot of academic archaeology is about refining the model. It's not about changing the model radically. I'm not aware of any current which is about radically changing the model. It's just me, really.

The evidence of a Jewish civilization going back more than two millennia is overwhelmingly borne out in the archaeology of the region. The heritage of the Jews in Palestine is documented.

Su cerebro es tan complejo que nunca trabaja únicamente a un nivel. Es como un yacimiento arqueológico interminable: cuando crees que has alcanzado la última capa y dejas caer el pico por última vez, descubres que hay otra mina entera debajo. Con un laberinto de túneles y pozas sin fondo.

How you are in this place that has been sealed since the time of Caesar Augustus? one of the archaeologists demanded in amazement. I was looking for my sister, Dan quipped. Your sister ? Oh—here she is. Dan reached through the opening and hauled out an equally grubby Amy.

A single high NH4 peak, traced to biomass burning across North America, begins at the [Younger Dryas] onset. It is the largest biomass-burning episode from North American sources in the entire record.

We are used to things starting out small and simple and then progressing--evolving--to become ever more complex and sophisticated, so this is naturally what we expect to find on archaeological sites. It upsets our carefully structured ideas of how civilizations should behave, how they should mature and develop, when we are confronted by a case like Göbekli Tepe that starts out perfect at the beginning and then slowly devolves until it is just a pale shadow of its former self.

As a paleontologist, [...] I ask the question--why weren't there humans here earlier? I mean, we have dispersal of Eurasian animal species into North America and dispersal of North American species into Eurasia at earlier times. So why shouldn't humans have been here as well? [Quoting Tom Deméré]

For more than half a century, [...] American archaeology was so riddled with pre-formed opinions about how the past should look, and about the orderly, linear way in which civilizations should evolve, that it repeatedly missed, sidelined, and downright ignored evidence for any human presence at all prior to Clovis--until, at any rate, the mass of that evidence became so overwhelming that it took the existing paradigm by storm.

The two earliest surviving written versions of this global flood "myth" can be seen today at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology

Despite the wanton destruction during the past 200 years, some outstanding sites have been saved in Louisiana,1 Mississippi,2 Alabama,3 Tennessee,4 Illinois,5 and Ohio,6 and there are also significant sites in Florida,7 Georgia,8 Texas,9 Arkansas,10 Kentucky,11 and Indiana.

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?

the evidence suggested that the Incas had often functioned as the restorers of these structures rather than their original builders.

Egyptologic"—i.e. that special form of reasoning, with a built-in double standard, deployed only by Egyptologists.

Viable offspring capable of reproduction resulted from all these liaisons and in August 2018, Denisova Cave obliged yet again by yielding up a bone fragment, more than 50,000 years old and in sufficiently good condition for genome sequencing. It turned out to have belonged to a female, about 13 years of age, who had a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father.57

At Gunung Padang] First, the drill cores contained evidence--fragments of worked columnar basalt--that more man-made megalithic structures lay far beneath the surface. Secondly, the organic materials brought up in the drill cores began to yield older and older dates--3000 BC to 5000 BC, then 9600 BC as the drills bit deeper, then around 11,000 BC, then 15,000 BC and finally, at depths of 27.5 meters (90 feet) and more, an astonishing sequence of dates of 20,000 BC to 22,000 BC and earlier.

Archaeologists are adamant that the epoch of the gods, which the Ancient Egyptians, called the First Time, is nothing more than a myth. The Ancient Egyptians, however, who may have been better informed about their past than we are, did not share this view.

Archaeology is too much constrained by a rigid reference frame of what is possible and what is not, and tends to ignore, sidestep, or ridicule evidence that challenged that reference frame.

Katie walked slowly around the excavation, trying to make sense of all the bones that were lying there, jumbled up like pick-a-sticks as if somebody had tossed them up into the air and let them scatter at random. She could make out at least three pelvises, and two breastbones, and innumerable vertebrae. She was used

Posts oriented into a Woodhenge, a huge circle for astronomical observations." "Like Stonehenge?" "Exactly like that. Or Cahokia, a similar site up in Illinois.