Lives in Ruins Quotes

“What was archaeology to him? It was the opposite of killing things. It was trying to will life back into stuff that had been forgotten and buried for thousands or millions of years. It was not about shards and pieces of bone or treasure; it was about kneeling down in the elements, paying very close attention, and trying to locate a spark of the human life that had once touched that spot there.”
― Marilyn Johnson, Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble

“You can tell the archaeologists, of course, by their photos. The tourists’ photos feature people in front of mountains, terraces, stone structures, sundials. The archaeologists wait until the people move away to take theirs: they want the terrace, the stone wall, the lintel, the human-made thing, all sans humans.”
― Marilyn Johnson, Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble

“Some of these tools were ingenious, including sets of playing cards for Iraq, Egypt, and Afghanistan—regular fifty-two-card decks, but with images and information about archaeological practices, famous cultural sites, and notable artifacts; the reverse sides could be pieced together to form a map of the most iconic site for each country.”
― Marilyn Johnson, Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble

“One graduate student told me, “When the Apocalypse comes, you want to know an archaeologist, because we know how to make fire, catch food, and create hill forts,” and I promptly added her to my address book. Knows how to make hill forts—who can say when that will come in handy?”
― Marilyn Johnson, Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble

“Homo sapiens who lived in caves put trash in front and slept in the back; not so in the caves occupied by Homo heidelbergensis. Those humans, probably the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens and neanderthalensis, lived like frat boys 700,000 to 300,000 years ago, “flinging shit everywhere”—and the idea of slovenly boy and girl ancestors fascinated me. “Big heavy stone tools . . . probably solved things with brute force. Commandos without too much thought,” Shea riffed. “If you were going to cast Jersey Shore, you’d go with heidelbergensis.”
― Marilyn Johnson, Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble

“One of the advantages of living in the Ice Age would be that there are not very many people around. You’re constantly moving, and you have to live by your wits. You can’t just have fifteen different kinds of tools, you can’t carry them. And no villages—no village idiots. Imagine a world free of idiots!” Idiots, he liked to point out, “don’t survive in environments with lions.”
― Marilyn Johnson, Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble

“It seems there was a custom in Ireland at this time of showing obeisance to your king by sucking his nipples. No nipples, you could not be a king.”
― Marilyn Johnson, Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble

“The convention that there were two sides to every story eliminated the third and fourth and fifth sides. Even dividing the past two and a half million years into the “Neolithic” (the new stone age) and the “Paleolithic” (the old stone age) was reductionist. “Write this down,” he said. “Dichotomies are for idiots.”
― Marilyn Johnson, Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble

“bone grease with dried meat and berries to make pemmican, the energy bars of a thousand years ago, and with a pouch of pemmican, the Native Americans were good to travel far and wide. (If you can’t pack portable food, you spend most of your time hunting and foraging).”
― Marilyn Johnson, Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble

“Place is not the background of archaeology—it’s the point. As any archaeologist will tell you, context is everything.”
― Marilyn Johnson, Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble