Quotes About Archaeology

With population pressures, urbanization, and modernization encroaching, we're in a race against time. Why not use the most advanced tools we have to map, quantify, and protect our past?

At 16, I got into local-education archaeology classes - you got to go to summer digs. It allowed me to be both intellectual and a bad girl with a wicked social life every evening!

The trend of all knowledge at the present is to specialize, but archaeology has in it all the qualities that call for the wide view of the human race, of its growth from the savage to the civilized, which is seen in all stages of social and religious development.

Calm down please, sir, if you will,' said the bobby, still retaining a firm hold upon the horse's reins. ' "Stolen" is such an ugly word. It is not technically stealing if you are a British archaeologist and you acquire items of historical significance in the savage realms and liberate them to civilisation.

Water has its own archaeology, not a layering but a leveling, and thus is truer to our sense of the past, because what is memory but near and far events spread and smoothed beneath the present's surface.

No archaeological discovery has ever controverted a biblical reference.

The Sumerians, living five thousand years ago in what is now Iran, are commonly believed to be the world's first civilization.

I could write a treatise on the sudden transformation of life into archaeology

recent scientific papers suggest that Egypt's great pyramids might be made not of carved blocks of stone, as long thought, but of limestone-rich concrete cast in place. [back]

The cliché has it that an unknown subject is a closed book, but Egypt was different. Egypt was an open book, with illustrations on every page, that no one knew how to read.

archaeologists have found the inscription ?????????? scratched on thousands of ancient Greek pots, given as gifts by older men to boys they found attractive. ??????????, ????? ? ????, "the boy is beautiful.

the ruins that can be seen today are of a later building), where Spartacus once fought.

In the past 20 years scientists from very diverse disciplines - anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists, psychologists - have all moved to a much more hopeful, optimistic view of human nature.

It's a bit naff, but there is something exciting about pulling a bit of pottery out of the ground that's 2,000 years old.

When we find a ship, we turn it over to the state or federal government. It's purely historical. I've never made a dime on any of it.

These trenches are like Pompeii, sir.

We have assumed that ancient houses were built like those of today – as weatherproof boxes for living in and raising families. So we have been very anxious to work out where people ate, slept and prepared their meals. It's all about what happened where – and we have discovered a great deal. But revealing where people slept or prepared their food makes little sense if we don't also try to appreciate what it was that motivated them to get out of bed every morning.

When no obvious practical purpose for a possible structure presents itself, archaeologists tend to reach for their explanation of last resort, namely 'ritual', or religion.

the rich smells would soon get them digging with their front feet and the well-defined hearths seen in the excavation trenches would rapidly be disturbed beyond recognition.

Just as a fossil is 'petrified time,' so is an ancient artifact or text.

Going to the Kuiper Belt is like an archaeological dig into the history of the solar system.

their owners were Mycenaeans heading for home when their ship foundered off the headland in southern Turkey known as Uluburun

Objects recovered have been identified as 'Egyptian, Nubian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Cypriot, Mycenaean, Italian, Balkan, and Baltic

Carthage, in modern Tunisia, had grown from its origins as a Phoenician settlement