Archaeology Quotes

“...as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold - everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment - an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by - I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously, 'Can you see anything?' it was all I could do to get out the words, 'Yes, wonderful things.”
― Howard Carter, The Tomb of Tutankhamen

“It's interesting to see that people had so much clutter even thousands of years ago. The only way to get rid of it all was to bury it, and then some archaeologist went and dug it all up.”
― Karl Pilkington, An Idiot Abroad: The Travel Diaries of Karl Pilkington

“Many questions come to mind. How influenced by contemporary religions were many of the scholars who wrote the texts available today? How many scholars have simply assumed that males have always played the dominant role in leadership and creative invention and projected this assumption into their analysis of ancient cultures? Why do so many people educated in this century think of classical Greece as the first major culture when written language was in use and great cities built at least twenty-five centuries before that time? And perhaps most important, why is it continually inferred that the age of the "pagan" religions, the time of the worship of female deities (if mentioned at all), was dark and chaotic, mysterious and evil, without the light of order and reason that supposedly accompanied the later male religions, when it has been archaeologically confirmed that the earliest law, government, medicine, agriculture, architecture, metallurgy, wheeled vehicles, ceramics, textiles and written language were initially developed in societies that worshiped the Goddess? We may find ourselves wondering about the reasons for the lack of easily available information on societies who, for thousands of years, worshiped the ancient Creatress of the Universe.”
― Merlin Stone, When God Was a Woman

“I will tell you a little secret about archaeologists, dear Reader. They all pretend t be very high-minded. They claim that their sole aim in excavation is to uncover the mysteries of the past and add to the store of human knowledge. They lie. What they really want is a spectacular discovery, so they can get their names in the newspapers and inspire envy and hatred in the hearts of their rivals.”
― Elizabeth Peters, The Deeds of the Disturber

“The geologist takes up the history of the earth at the point where the archaeologist leaves it, and carries it further back into remote antiquity.”
― Bal Gangadhar Tilak, The Arctic Home in the Vedas

“Discover how to visit the past and bring yesterday's stories into our lives today”
― Gillian Hovell, 'Visiting the Past'

“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.”
― Michael I. Rostovtzeff

“Come with me
And you will find
What's been trapped
Inside my mind...”
― K.B. Lewis

“Archaeologists only look at what lies beneath their feet. The sky and the heavens don't exist for them.”
― Agatha Christie, Murder in Mesopotamia

“[...] the success of Egyptian surgery in setting broken bones is very fully demonstrated in the large number of well-joined fractures found in the ancient skeletons.”
― James Henry Breasted, The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, 2 Vols

“THE BARROW

In this high field strewn with stones
I walk by a green mound,
Its edges sheared by the plough.
Crumbs of animal bone
Lie smashed and scattered round
Under the clover leaves
And slivers of flint seem to grow
Like white leaves among green.
In the wind, the chestnut heaves
Where a man's grave has been.

Whatever the barrow held
Once, has been taken away:
A hollow of nettles and dock
Lies at the centre, filled
With rain from a sky so grey
It reflects nothing at all.
I poke in the crumbled rock
For something they left behind
But after that funeral
There is nothing at all to find.

On the map in front of me
The gothic letters pick out
Dozens of tombs like this,
Breached, plundered, left empty,
No fragments littered about
Of a dead and buried race
In the margins of histories.
No fragments: these splintered bones
Construct no human face,
These stones are simply stones.

In museums their urns lie
Behind glass, and their shaped flints
Are labelled like butterflies.
All that they did was die,
And all that has happened since
Means nothing to this place.
Above long clouds, the skies
Turn to a brilliant red
And show in the water's face
One living, and not these dead."

— Anthony Thwaite, from The Owl In The Tree”
― Anthony Thwaite

“Until humans came and made anthills out of these mountains, Diwan Sahib was saying, looking up at the langurs, the land had belonged to these monkeys, and to barking deer, nilgai, tiger, barasingha, leopards, jackals, the great horned owl, and even to cheetahs and lions. The archaeology of the wilderness consisted of these lost animals, not of ruined walls, terracotta amulets, and potsherds.”
― Anuradha Roy, The Folded Earth

“Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father's castle.”
― Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky

“Where can one buy a lit of that *Right Stuff* bravado required to shrug off the fact that your airplane is now a convertible?”
― Josh Gates, Destination Truth: Memoirs of a Monster Hunter

“Every archaeologist knows in his heart why he digs. He digs, in pity and humility, that the dead may live again, that what is past may not be forever lost, that something may be salvaged from the wreck of ages.”
― Geoffrey Bibby, The Testimony of the Spade

“The Atlantean Road by Stewart Stafford

A snake of stones
beneath the waters
Soldiers march
past spectral daughters

Phantom travellers
To work or home
Atlantean lives
replay in foam

The water drowned
out extinct times
Of joy and war
Of love and crime

The divers rapt
by sound immemorial
Echoes entombed
Sweet voices choral

The flame of Erasmus
and barking sounds
Of canine guards
and strangers found

The road roused
from silent sleep
To tell explorers
how ancients weep

© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“To talk of the first humans is to hammer a signpost into an ancient river saying 'no humans beyond this point', no matter the ever flowing stream around it's base. There is nothing essential to humanity, no single feature that intrinsically caused one creature to be human where its parents were not... However hard you try to define every point before the signpost as non-human, and every point after the post as human, the river flows continually.”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds

“The problem with material remains is that they are silent: they don't provide their own interpretations. And that means various interpretations are possible.”
― Bart D. Ehrman, Heaven and Hell: A History of the Afterlife

“The Thames is England's longest archaeological landscape and thousands of the objects that fill our museums have come from its foreshore. (p.47)”
― Lara Maiklem , Mudlark: In Search of London's Past Along the River Thames

“Europe sapped Antiquity under the Syrians, the Iraqis, the Egyptians. Our triumphant nations appropriated the universal with their monopoly on science and archaeology, dispossessing the colonize populations by means of this pillage of a past that, as a result, they readily experienced as alien: and so brainwashed Islamist wreckers drive tractors all the more easily through ancient cities since they combine their profoundly uncultivated stupidity with the more or less widespread feeling that this heritage is alien, retroactive emanation of foreign powers.”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“Curious archaeologists later dug up Brahe’s body and found a green crust on the front of his skull – meaning Brahe had probably worn not a silver but a cheaper, lighter copper nose. (Or perhaps he switched noses, like earrings, depending on the status of his company.)”
― Sam Kean, The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“The innate propensity to look for and impose structure is revealed as a prominent feature of our species both by archaeology and in extant hunter-gatherer societies.”
― Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization

“Abandoned weapons and corpses may be washed away, removed by animals, dismembered by the victors as trophies, or buried, burned, or otherwise disposed of by the vanquished after defeat. It is reasonable to expect that direct archaeological evidence of warfare will be limited, and that it will actually tend to underestimate the frequency and bloody nature of past conflicts.”
― Malcolm Potts, Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World

“Determination filled her as she made up her mind. Her parents did this for a living, and she was going to prove in her own way that she could be useful on these trips. She would be a part of the family business and help find these artifacts that seemed to be disappearing into the mist.”
― Lauren de Leeuw, Secrets in the Islands: A Sami Series Adventure

“The only field in which we can find absolute certainty is religion. In all other activities we must be content with the best (meaning both the simplest and the most data-inclusive) interpretation we can advance, given the data as they now stand.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“Every human catastrophe, however, is archaeology's gain.”
― Robert Garland , The Other Side of History : Daily Life in the Ancient World

“He didn’t show any obvious signs of the Black Death but it would have suited him.”
― V.R. Ling, King Street Run

“The method I propose to explore in this book is designed to help us look at ideas from a practical point of view—to look at what ideas do rather than at whether the judgements they figure in are true—in order to see how exactly our ideas are bound up with our needs and concerns. This method, which I propose to call pragmatic genealogy, consists in telling partly fictional, partly historical narratives exploring what might have driven us to develop certain ideas in order to discover what these ideas do for us. What point do they serve? What is the salient useful difference these ideas make to the lives of those who live by them? Much as an archaeologist who digs up a mysterious relic will try to reverse-engineer its point by imaginatively reconstructing the life of those who used it and hypothesizing what useful difference it might have made to that life, we can take an abstract idea whose point eludes us, such as truth, knowledge, or justice, and try to explain why we came to think in these terms by reconstructing the practical problems that these ideas offer practical solutions to. A pragmatic genealogy answers the question of why we came to think as we do by reverse-engineering the points of ideas, tracing them to their practical origins, and revealing what they do for us when they function well.”
― Matthieu Queloz

“You sound quite a fan of archaeology, Harry.' Nelson grunted. ' Lots of its bollocks, of course, but you can't deny they know their stuff. And I like the way they do things. It's organised. I like organisation.”
― Elly Griffiths, The Crossing Places

“Le Guin has a point. Obviously, we have no idea how relatively happy the inhabitants of Ukrainian mega-sites like Maidenetske or Nebelivka were, compared to the lords who constructed kurgan burials, or even the retainers ritually sacrificed at their funerals; or the bonded labourers who provided wheat and barley to the inhabitants of later Greek colonies along the Black Sea coast (though we can guess), and as anyone who has read the story knows, Omelas had some problems too. But the point remains: why do we assume that people who have figured out a way for a large population to govern and support itself without temples, palaces and military fortifications – that is, without overt displays of arrogance, self-abasement and cruelty – are somehow less complex than those who have not?”
― David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity