Quotes About Archaeology

As many as one out of every ten people met a violent death in the first millennium A.D., the archaeologist Ian Morris has estimated. Ever since, violence has declined—gradually, then suddenly. In the decades after the Second World War, rates of violent death plunged to the lowest levels ever seen.

Alan L. Kolata excavated at Tiwanaku during the 1980s and early 1990s. He has written that by 1000 A.D. the city had a population of as much as 115,000, with another quarter million in the surrounding countryside—numbers that Paris would not reach for another five centuries.

At Marajó, Meggers and Evans soon noticed an oddity: the earliest traces of Marajóara culture were the most elaborate. As the centuries advanced, the quality of the ceramics inexorably declined.

In Deloria's opinion, archaeology is mainly about easing white guilt. Determining that Indians superseded other people fits neatly into this plan. If we're only thieves who stole our land from someone else, Deloria said, then they can say, 'Well, we're just the same. We're all immigrants here, aren't we?

Tentatively, therefore, archaeologists assign the invention of zero to sometime before 32 B.C., centuries ahead of its invention in India.

Traditionally, archaeologists have regarded the wet tropics as unpromising. Because Amazonia has little stone or metal, "99 percent of material culture was perishable," Erickson told me. "Cane, chonta [palm wood], bones, basketry, wood—none of it survives these conditions. The whole culture, even if it was there for thousands of years, seems to be gone.

As archaeologists have recently learned, the first inhabitants of the western Amazon created a swath of earthworks that stretches between the Beni in southeastern Bolivia and Acre in western Brazil—a seven-hundred mile swath of raised fields; canal-like water channels; tall settlement mounds; circular pools; permanent, zigzag fish weirs; mile-long, raised causeways; and hundreds of earthworks

Most geoglyphs seem to be late, dating to only a few hundred years before Columbus. The ubiquity of the geoglyphs may indicate that some type of cultural movement swept over earlier social arrangements. "But whatever was there, these societies have been completely forgotten

The Foxhall jaw has now been missing for many years.

I'd love to do something like put a piece of moon rock on Mars and a piece of Mars on the moon, a sort of reverse archaeology.

What is amazing to me as an archaeologist is that the more and more I study, I realize we are resilient, we are creative, we are brilliant, and this is what makes us human, and that hasn't changed since we've been human.

They're specialists, the whole lot of them, and they don't believe in a method of work which cuts into every field of science from botany to archaeology. They limit their own scope in order to be able to dig in the depths with more concentration for details. Modern research demands that every special branch shall dig in its own hole. It's not usual for anyone to sort out what comes up out of the holes and try to put it all together.

HISTORIANS HAVE established that wine production in the Peloponnese region began over 7,000 years ago.

Then was the monument called "Stonehenge," which stands, as all men know, upon the plain of Salisbury to this very day.

is now evident that many events of biblical history did not take place in either the particular era or the manner described. Some of the most famous events in the Bible clearly never happened at all.

from various periods but (since its site was obliterated

There are two types of collector, I think. There are those who are quite academic, and get into the archaeology of finding the earliest example of a particular idea. Then there are those interested in what's new.

They were of many types of seals, all bearing the insignia of the King.

I've found numerous things - settlements, temples, possible pyramids, forts, roads - the list goes on and on. I'm not as interested in the discoveries as the types of questions they help us formulate.

Searching for a lost city is a particularly European obsession.

seal cylinder.

Selam is our most complete skeleton of a three-year-old girl who lived and died 3.3 million years ago. She belongs to the species known as Australopithecus afarensis.

I've always wanted to see what Egypt was like when they were building the pyramids or Rome at the height of the empire or Greece - more specifically, Crete before it was destroyed. Why? Because I'm curious how we all hung out on a day to day basis, what was the chit chat, etc. Reading things in a book never gives you the feel.

With the discovery of Zinjanthropus at Olduvai Gorge in 1959, my grandmother Mary Leakey pioneered the research in East Africa with my grandfather Louis. Many more spectacular fossil finds have since been made, both in Africa and elsewhere, by many researchers driven to understand our past.