Quotes About Archaeology

significance), 600,000 known archaeological sites (and more being found every day; more being lost, too), 3,500 historic cemeteries, 70,000 war memorials, 4,000 sites of special scientific interest, 18,500 medieval churches, and 2,500 museums containing 170 million objects. Having such a fund of richness means that it can sometimes be taken for granted to a shocking degree, but

So the first dinosaur bone ever found was also the first to be lost.

It is the patchiness of the record that makes each new find look so sudden and distinct from all the others.

explaining how a bucolic, lightly populated county like Norfolk could produce twenty-seven thousand archaeological finds a year, more than any other county in England.

Silbury Hill is a wonder. It is 130 feet high—about the height of a ten-story building—and is entirely made by hand. It is the tallest artificial prehistoric mound in the world. There is nothing like it anywhere else. It is covered in grass and is uniform all the way around. It is sensationally lovely to look at. It is genuinely perfect. It deserves to be world famous.

Childe would almost certainly have been fascinated with Çatalhöyük because almost nothing about the place made sense.

Silbury Hill in Wiltshire

we know more about how ancient Greeks and Romans sat or reclined than we do about the English of eight hundred years ago.

It was as if a complex, sophisticated society of fifteen million people simply walked away from their lives one day and never came back, leaving nothing but deserted cities and abandoned architectural masterpieces in their wake.

But, Miss Spencer, I should strike a note of caution. I know there have been women archaeologists in Greece, in Turkey. Even Egypt. But this is Peshawar. Pathan men don't much like the idea of women...' 'Don't much like the idea of women doing what?' 'Don't much like the idea of women.

In the islands of the Aegean Sea, every island is full of graves.

we are not the only ones who knew a Stone Age: our closest relatives still live in one. To stress this point, a "percussive stone technology" site (including stone assemblies and the remains of smashed nuts) was excavated in a tropical forest in Ivory Coast, where chimpanzees must have been opening nuts for at least four thousand years.31 These discoveries led to a human-ape lithic culture story

We've found that patterns of site looting have increased between 500 and 1000 percent since the start of the Arab Spring. Now this is a problem as old as human beings. 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.

So much of the physical world has been explored. But the deluge of data I get to investigate really lets me chart new territory. Genetic data from people living today forms an archaeological record of what happened to their ancestors 10,000 years ago.

About 15,000 years ago, humans colonised America, wiping out in the process about 75% of its large mammals. Numerous other species disappeared from Africa, from Eurasia, and from the myriad islands around their coasts. The archaeological record of country after country tells the same sad story.

No amounts of stone and bone could yield the kinds of information that the paintings gave so freely.

When I was a young boy, I was obsessed with skulls and mummies and things like that.

One of the things that I love to do is travel around the world and look at archaeological sites. Because archaeology gives us an opportunity to study past civilizations, and see where they succeeded and where they failed. Use science to, you know, work backwards and say, 'Well, really, what were they thinking?'

I'm very interested in how people in the 19th century travelled to Greece.

When we find something new at Giza, we announce it to the world. The Sphinx and the Pyramids are world treasures. We are the guardian's of these treasures, but they belong to the world.

Iraq has a tremendous amount of history.

It has been mentioned that in Trench I there is evidence of three successive stages of these defences.

Time Team' is by definition very static. Once you're in that field and you've dug your trenches, that's it.

If one were to rely solely on radiocarbon dating, the whole human world would seem to have started just over 40,000 years ago. Only