Quotes About Archaeology

Archaeologists often distinguish calibrated from uncalibrated dates by writing the former in upper-case letters and the latter in lower-case letters (for example, 3000 B.C. vs. 3000 B.C., respectively).

The earliest preserved examples of the Etruscan and Roman alphabets are also inscriptions on drinking cups and wine containers.

The famous Java Homo erectus fossils prove that humans have occupied at least western Indonesia for a million years.

Japan's most important archaeological monuments—the 158 gigantic kofun tombs constructed between A.D. 300 and 686, and thought to contain the remains of ancestral emperors and their families—are still the property of the Imperial Household Agency. Excavation of the tombs is forbidden because it would constitute desecration—and it might also shed undesired light on where Japan's imperial family really came from (e.g., perhaps Korea?).

For instance, the mass production of bronze tools, which was just beginning in the South American Andes in the centuries before A.D. 1500, was already established in parts of Eurasia over 4,000 years earlier.

The near-simultaneous disappearance of so many large species raises an obvious question: what caused it? An obvious possible answer is that they were killed off or else eliminated indirectly by the first arriving humans. Recall

Based on such evidence, archaeologists infer that chiefdoms began to arise locally by around 5500 BC.

The map we made of the 3,000-year-old city of Tanis requires no imagination. It has buildings, streets, admin complexes, houses - clear as day.

One of the things that struck me when I was a kid and I was learning about Pompeii was these figures that were frozen in the moments of their death. It is very powerful imagery, and it is very emotional and very evocative.

'Satellite archaeology' refers to the use of NASA and commercial high resolution satellite datasets to map and discover past structures, cities, and geological features.

So much history buried underneath. We spend our lives to try to dig it out, but always the present buries it again.

Someone had been digging. Someone had been looting. A pot hunter. A Thief of Time.

You notice anything about the skeletons?" Leaphorn was squatting now in the shallow trench, examining bones. "Somebody seemed to be interested in the jawbones," Chee said.

Every piece of art will be if it's lucky enough to be dug up, if there's anything to dig up.

The Late Bronze Age in the southern parts of Britain, according to most authorities, began about 1000 B.C. and lasted until about 400 B.C.

Who knows how long it's been there? It could date back a few hundred years for all I know.' 'Or to Roman times,' he says, smiling wryly.

discoveries: a burial pit in Wales that contained the remains of what most scholars agreed was the first-century English queen Boadicea. She had been found buried in an ancient war chariot, surrounded by weapons, golden armbands, and other trinkets.

I can't think of any other region in the world which is such a vast source of fossils.

In every island of the Aegean Sea are found abundant traces of a vast prehistoric empire.

How do you find a buried city in a vast landscape? Finding it randomly would be the equivalent of locating a needle in a haystack, blindfolded, wearing baseball mitts.

Pompeii was an incredibly corrupt city. Pompeii was the Las Vegas of the Roman Empire.

There's even an aircraft sensor system that sends down hundreds of thousands of pulses of light measured at different return rates. It allows you to literally strip away vegetation and see entire cities beneath the rain forest canopy. This is the unbelievable future of archaeology.

The only technology that can 'see' beneath the ground is radar imagery. But satellite imagery also allows scientists to map short- and long-term changes to the Earth's surface. Buried archaeological remains affect the overlying vegetation, soils and even water in different ways, depending on the landscapes you're examining.

At school, we'd studied the Romans and the Saxons, and I was fascinated by it all. So I made my dad take me to the British Museum as often as possible.