Quotes About Archaeology

Douglas Preston

Douglas Preston

There are only a few really high-profile archaeological cultures in the world: Egypt and the Maya.

Douglas Preston

Douglas Preston

Douglas Preston

What Strong realized right away was that these were not Maya cities: The Maya built with stone, while this region had been extensively settled by a separate, sophisticated culture that built great earthen mounds. This was an entirely new culture.

Douglas Preston

If you have the golden chicken, the archaeologists don't want the chicken to produce any golden eggs, but the tourist guys, they want to cut it open to get all the eggs at once. There should be a balance.

Archaeologists only look at what lies beneath their feet. The sky and the heavens don't exist for them.

I married an archaeologist because the older I grow, the more he appreciates me.

but I do take an enormous interest in the personal aspects of what archaeology reveals. I like to find a little dog buried under the threshold, inscribed on which are the words: 'Don't stop to think, Bite him!' Such a good motto for a guard-dog; you can see it being written on the clay, and someone laughing. The contract tablets are interesting,

Idealan muž je arheolog jer što je žena starija to ga više zanima.

Little by little the head emerged, preserved by the sludge for about 2,500 years. There it was–the biggest ivory head ever found: a soft, pale brownish colour, the hair black, the faintly coloured lips with the enigmatic smile of one of the maidens of the Akropolis. The Lady of the Well–the Mona Lisa, as the Iraqi Director of Antiquities insisted on calling her–she has her place now in the new museum at Baghdad: one of the most exciting things ever to be found. There

For Freud, the semiotic trajectory of the dreamwork determines a phantom architectonics: a cartography of nowhere, an architecture of nothing (or the unconscious), and an archaeology of imaginary depth that always takes place on the surface. As a practice and sensibility, psychoanalysis remains attuned to superficiality; it constitutes a search for depth on the surface of things.

Peru was the Incas; it has 3,000 to 4,000 years of history.

Not a single piece of material culture - not a single object - has been found at Giza that can be interpreted to come from a lost civilization.

When a wall is slowly covered over by earth, the materials it's made from decay and become part of the soils around and above it, sometimes causing vegetation above and next to the wall to grow faster or slower. Satellite imagery helps archaeologists to pick up these subtle changes.

Look at the walls of Pompeii. That's what got the internet started.

Children hop around Phylakopi on sea-polished pebbles the size of bean bags and bask themselves, alongside the lizards, astride the sturdily built walls of Iron Age homes.

It was very clear that this was a very, very old site. There were remains of sod walls. Fishermen assumed it was an old Indian site. Bu Indians didn't use that kind of buildings and houses.

I found in one of the tombs an inscription saying, 'If you touch my tomb, you will be eaten by a crocodile and hippopotamus.' It doesn't mean the hippo will eat you, it means the person really wanted his tomb to be protected.

Ancient barrows get cleared away. Legislation is pretty much 19th century. Global warming means there is an awful lot of erosion, exposing new archaeology, there is not the funding around to deal with it.

We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.