Quotes About Archaeology

In the shallow parts of many Swiss lakes, where there is a depth of no more than from 5 to 15 feet of water, ancient wooden piles are observed at the bottom sometimes worn down to the surface of the mud, sometimes projecting slightly above it.

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.

Here before us was sufficient evidence to show that it really was an entrance to a tomb, and by the seals, to all outward appearances that it was intact.

We can tell from the imagery a tomb was looted from a particular period of time, and we can alert INTERPOL to watch out for antiquities from that time that may be offered for sale.

Slipping down into the bedrock 100m inside the partially excavated tomb of Pharaoh Senwosret at Abydos, I really thought I was going to die. Oxygen levels are dangerously low and, with over 90 per cent humidity, it was hard to breathe - we were all drenched with sweat.

I will announce some of the tombs I found next to the great pyramid of Khufu. One is an intact tomb that I have not opened yet.

The presence of industrial quantities of Byzantine pottery dating from the sixth century AD on the headland at Tintagel, Chinese silk in the tombs around Mecca and 'Arabic' numerals in the 13th-century beams of Salisbury Cathedral tell us we have been interdependent not for decades but across millennia.

People were looting tombs 5,000 years ago in Egypt as soon as people were buried, but the problem is only getting worse and worse.

In archaeology, context is the basis of many discoveries that are imputed to the deliberate workings of intelligence. If I find a rock chipped in such a way as to give it a sharp edge, and the discovery is made in a cave, I am seduced into ascribing this to tool use by distant, fetid and furry ancestors.

We're literally just beginning to learn how to use satellites to find sites. More and more people are realizing there's this incredible tool.

It's an important tool to focus where we're excavating. It gives us a much bigger perspective on archaeological sites. We have to think bigger, and that's what the satellites allow us to do.

I am one of many people documenting damage and looting at ancient sites from space - it is such a crucial tool.

I felt that in time simple stone tools would be found in early Pleistocene in England.

You have to remember that not every creature that was evolving left behind its skull or its tools for our convenience tens of thousands of years later. Most bones or most tools rot or get buried and are never found again.

One should not forget that there are very few surviving items from this period, often just single, small bones, a tooth, a sliver of the skull. Categorizing these pieces can be very difficult.

When future archaeologists dig up the remains of California, they're going to find all of those gyms their scary-looking gym equipment, and they're going to assume that we were a culture obsessed with torture.

It cannot be stressed enough that there is no certain independent date for any of the archaeological material from earliest Rome or the area round about, and that arguments still rage about the age of almost every major find.

The innate propensity to look for and impose structure is revealed as a prominent feature of our species both by archaeology and in extant hunter-gatherer societies.

If humanity survives long enough to understand what he really was, they can dig him up and put on display the grandiose depravity of the twentieth century.

The problem with material remains is that they are silent: they don't provide their own interpretations. And that means various interpretations are possible.

During our World History lesson that morning, Mr. Avenovich loaded up a stand-alone simulation so that our class could witness the discovery of King Tut's tomb by archaeologists in Egypt in AD 1922. (The day before, we'd visited the same spot in 1334 BC and had seen Tutankhamen's empire in all its glory.)

Feverishly we cleared away the remaining last scraps of rubbish on the floor of the passage before the doorway, until we had only the clean sealed doorway before us.

If you really want to be a good archaeologist, you have to understand ancient DNA; you have to understand chemical analysis to figure out the composition of ancient pots. You have to be able to study human remains. You need to be able to do computer processing and, in some cases, computer programming.

After clearing 9 metres of the descending passage, in about the middle of the afternoon, we came upon a second sealed doorway, which was almost the exact replica of the first.