Archaeology Quotes

1. "Tedious as it may appear to some to dwell on the discovery of odds and ends that have, no doubt, been thrown away by the owner as rubbish ... yet it is by the study of such trivial details that Archaeology is mainly dependent for determining the date of earthworks. ... Next to coins fragments of pottery afford the most reliable of all evidence ..."
Author: Augustus Pitt Rivers

2. "Oral myths are closer to the genetic conclusions than the often ambiguous scientific evidence of archaeology."
Author: Bryan Sykes

3. "Life was taking its vengeance on me, and that vengeance consisted merely in coming back, nothing more. Every case of madness involves something coming back. People who are possessed are not possessed by something that just comes but instead by something that comes back. Sometimes life comes back. If in me everything crumbled before that power, it is not because that power was itself necessarily an overwhelming one: it in fact had only to come, since it had already become too full-flowing a force to be controlled or contained - when it appeared it overran everything. And then, like after a flood, there floated a wardrobe, a person, a loose window, three suitcases. And that seemed like Hell to me, that destruction of layers and layers of human archaeology."
Author: Clarice Lispector

4. "Meteorology . . . is quite as "scientific" as geology and far more so than archaeology—it actually makes more use of scientific instruments, computers, and higher mathematics. . . . Yet we laugh at the weatherman every other day; we are not overawed by his impressive paraphernalia, because we can check up on him any time we feel like it: he makes his learned pronouncements—and then it rains or it doesn't rain.No scientific conclusion is to be trusted without testing—to the extent to which exact sciences are exact they are also experimental sciences; it is in the laboratory that the oracle must be consulted. But the archaeologist is denied access to the oracle. For him there is no neat and definitive demonstration; he is doomed to plod along, everlastingly protesting and fumbling through a laborious, often rancorous running debate that never ends."
Author: Hugh Nibley

5. "The evidence of a Jewish civilization going back more than two millennia is overwhelmingly borne out in the archaeology of the region. The heritage of the Jews in Palestine is documented."
Author: Jack Schwartz

6. "Aside from criminology, I'd say archaeology has the highest body count."
Author: Jarod Kintz

7. "Archaeology is the peeping Tom of the sciences. It is the sandbox of men who care not where they are going; they merely want to know where everyone else has been."
Author: Jim Bishop

8. "We are opening up an enormous new era in archaeology. Time capsules in the deep oceans."
Author: John F. Lehman Jr.

9. "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."
Author: Margaret Murray

10. "As a writer, one is busy with archaeology."
Author: Michael Ondaatje

11. "For me archaeology is not a source of illustrations for written texts, but an independent source of historical information, with no less value and importance, sometimes more importance, that the written sources."
Author: Michael Rostovtzeff

12. "As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end."
Author: Michel Foucault

13. "I'm not an historian but I can get interested - obsessively interested - with any aspect of the past, whether it's palaeontology or archaeology or the very recent past."
Author: Penelope Lively

14. "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."
Author: Richard Dawkins

15. "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."
Author: Ron Rash

16. "I'm so fascinated with the study of people and why they are the way they are. That's my research and my archaeology, if you will, when I get a role. I'm so excited to attack a part from every angle of what makes a person a person."
Author: Sara Canning

17. "I had come at last, in the course of this rambling, to the shelves which hold books by the living; by women and by men; for there are almost as many books written by women now as by men. Or if that is not yet quite true, if the male is still the voluble sex, it is certainly true that women no longer write novels solely. There are Jane Harrison's books on Greek archaeology; Vernon Lee's books on aesthetics; Gertrude Bell's books on Persia."
Author: Virginia Woolf

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