Quotes About Archaeology

It's not a huge surprise that there are habitations at the bottom of the Black Sea.

I keep being surprised by the amount of archaeological sites and features that are left to find all over the world.

A lot of people are surprised when I talk so much about the present, but politics is just a crucial part of archaeology.

The Great British Dig' is a fantastic format which combines finding out about the history of where you live and the surprising things that lie under your own back garden. Its kind of a community archaeology project.

If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worse than ignorant, they are deluded to the point of perversity. They are denying not only the facts of biology but those of physics, geology, cosmology, archaeology, history and chemistry as well.

Before writing was invented and before scientific archaeology started, word-of-mouth storytelling, with all its Chinese Whispery distortions, was the only way people learned about history.

Skeletal remains show that plant-fed humans were a head shorter than meat-eating hunters, prone to anemia, infectious diseases, rotten teeth, and bone disorders.

What is conserved in the ground? Stone, bronze, ivory, bone, sometimes pottery. Never wood objects, no fabric or skins. That completely skews our notions about primitive man.

We made in those days tiny identical rooms inside our bodies which the men who uncover our graves will find in a thousand years shining and whole.

The first money I ever earned was for drawing stone tools.

I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather the archaeology of that silence.

I have always wanted to know why, wherever archaeologists dig, do they always find red and white poles?

Chaldeans came from an undetermined part of East Arabia.

its city walls encompassed an area of over two square miles, with much of the city apparently lying outside those walls. This made Uruk the largest city not only of its age but for the next three thousand years.

Even more remarkable—and a key reason Bob invited me to Hasanlu—was the object cradled in the arms of the front runner. The object was a bowl (or a vase, or a beaker): a metal vessel measuring about eight inches high, seven inches across the top, and six inches across the base. The falling walls had flattened the bowl, of course, along with the guy carrying it.

Language death is like no other form of disappearance. When people die, they leave signs of their presence in the world, in the form of their dwelling places, burial mounds, and artefacts - in a word, their archaeology. But spoken language leaves no archaeology. When a language dies, which has never been recorded, it is as if it has never been.

I want to become a student. I want to read Chinese history and go on a dig.

I am convinced that the stratigraphic method will in the future enable archaeology to throw far more light on the history of American culture than it has done in the past.

For the earliest period of the history of Israel, all that precedes the building of the temple, not a trace can be found of any sanctuary of exclusive legitimacy.

I guess what this is reflecting is my own search for answers that I can't find. Frank [Moore Cross] and I have examined a lot of archaeological materials in the hope of finding out.

Archaeology is the study of humanity itself, and unless that attitude towards the subject is kept in mind archaeology will be overwhelmed by impossible theories or a welter of flint chips.

The dinosaurs are remember only by their bones. What will we be remembered for with humanity?

The most I can hope for is to die in a pose that confuses future archaeologists.

Indiana Jones is very much an old-world kind of hero. He doesn't really have any kind of superpower or rely on any kind of technology to help him out of things.