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

“Such is the nature of archaeology - an ongoing mystery tale whose plot slowly unfolds.”
― Eric H. Cline

“Without realising how far he had walked or how quickly he had walked it, there stood the imposing edifice of Emmanuel, rising like an iceberg - the frozen water variety not the vegetable - from the bustling metropolitan sea.”
― V.R. Ling, King Street Run

“Power, my young friends, is nothing but fear in disguise. Those who seek power do so because they are afraid — afraid of their own insignificance, afraid of losing control, afraid of facing the truth about themselves.”
― Anton Sammut, The Heirs of the Lost Legacy: A Modern Odyssey in a Forgotten Past

“Despite what the SIS:TUM implies, not everything is a business. Not everything is for sale. There are swathes of potential students with first class minds who can't meet the Faustian deal passed off as tuition fees, so instead of formulating scientific hypotheses or writing the next great masterpiece, they're on zero hour contracts stacking the shelves in supermarkets...”
― V.R. Ling, King Street Run

“It may be said of some very old places, as of some very old books, that they are destined to be forever new. The nearer we approach them, the more remote they seem: the more we study them, the more we have yet to learn. Time augments rather than diminishes their everlasting novelty; and to our descendants of a thousand years hence it may safely be predicted that they will be even more fascinating than to ourselves. This is true of many ancient lands, but of no place is it so true as of Egypt.”
― Kathleen Sheppard, Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age

“That's how archaeology has always been done. A union between those with the money and those with the skills.”
― Tess Gerritsen, The Keepsake

“Around the world other countries have laws to protect their archaeological heritage...We continue to do a very bad job of preserving and managing our own heritage, a heritage that also belongs to the Native Americans who preceded us here.”
― Jerald T. Milanich, Famous Florida Sites: Mt. Royal and Crystal River

“You're becoming superfluous to your own existence.”
― V.R. Ling, King Street Run

“One of the hallmarks of lamentation is its excess. Talking becomes screaming, singing becomes wailing. Mourners act out their pain on their own bodies, tearing their clothes and hair, beating their chests, even inflicting injuries. This intensity sets it apart from other forms of public witnessing. Lamentation is communication as it reels toward the unsayable, the inexpressible pain of loss. I see in practices of exhumation, in the lengths gone to recover the dead after annihilating violence, something of this excess. The enormous forensic undertakings are scientific and legal efforts, but they are also expressions of pain and acts of faith. As a postcard pinned to an office door at the FAFG forensic laboratory says: “Archeology is my religion.”
― Alexa Hagerty

“Annoying though archaeologists can be he admires their way with a tench. His scene-of-crime boys could never get the edges that straight”
― Elly Griffiths, The House at Sea's End

“The evening had that perfect October feel—warm enough to sit outside in a t-shirt but cool enough that the bourbon felt right, like a comfortable handshake between old friends.”
― R Jay Driskill

“I slouched in my weathered deck chair, bourbon glass balanced on my knee, watching the sunset paint the sky over Fort Walton Beach in broad strokes of crimson and gold.”
― R Jay Driskill

“Rules and Julian James had always maintained a relationship best described as 'open.”
― R Jay Driskill

“The smart play would be backing off. But I'd never built my reputation on smart moves—just effective ones.”
― R Jay Driskill

“Archaeologists take a flake of stone, a sherd of pottery, a grain of quartz sand, and make of it a scrying glass to see deep into a past, hoping to resolve details through the haze of more recent times.”
― Alice Gorman, Beyond the Earth: An Anthology of Human Messages into Deep Space and Cosmic Time