Quotes About Excavation

In December 1945 an Egyptian peasant, digging for soft and fertile soil near the village of Nag Hammadi in upper Egypt, exhumed a red earthenware jar. It proved to contain thirteen codices— papyrus books or scrolls—bound in leather.

The strip-mining of "relevant content" replaces the slow excavation of meaning. IT

Someone once told me that archaeologists are anthropologists who don't like live people. They dig up dead ones because dead ones can't talk back. That's not quite true. But I think live people are too fast for most archaeologists. We're a slow-moving lot.

One longs for news from the buried ruins of some stronghold miraculously untouched since Batu Khan set fire to it, the trove, perhaps, of some Transylvanian forester digging out a fox or a badger and suddenly tumbling through the creepers and the roots into a dry vault full of iron chests abrim with parchments...