19th-century Archaeologist Quotes

T. E. Lawrence

Flinders Petrie

Nicholas Roerich

Gertrude Bell

Jagadish Chandra Bose

Mortimer Wheeler

Charles Thomas Newton

There must always be an element of chance and of opportunism in an excavation, however carefully planned. But scientific digging is not on that account a gamble.

Mortimer Wheeler

Archaeology is like any other comprehensive subject; it requires study, discriminating care, and enthusiasm. One should further add, it requires inspiration. A man who does not love to hunt specimens for the sake of hunting them has not his heart in the work.

Warren K. Moorehead

Archaeology differs from history in... that it has to do only with existing remains explained by history, while [history] has to do with the things that have been, without regard to whether there are any visible remains or not.

John Henry Parker

In separate favoured regions, various kinds of men set out to domesticate and master the gifts and forces around them: to "live well," in the old Greek phrase, under the given conditions of their home, or failing this, to seek and make a new one: in either event, to comply as well as to command; to conquer Nature by observance of her laws.

In few kinds of work are the results so directly dependent on the personality of the worker as they are in excavating. The old saying that a man finds what he looks for in a subject, is too true; or if he has not enough insight to ensure finding what he looks for, it is at least sadly true that he does not find anything that he does not look for.

Flinders Petrie

The digger who will best observe and record his discoveries is precisely he who sees them as historical material and rightly appraises them: if he has not the power of synthesis and interpretation he has mistaken his calling.

Leonard Woolley

Man's history has been graven on the rock of Egypt, stamped on the brick of Assyria, enshrined in the marble of the Parthenon-it rises before us a majestic presence in the piled up arches of the Coliseum-it lurks an unsuspected treasure amid the oblivious dust of archives and monasteries-it is embodied in all the looms of religions, of races, of families.

Charles Thomas Newton

These works of Nature [gemstones], by their beauty and the wonderful symmetry of their primary forms, have from the very dawn of science aroused the speculations of inquiring minds, which discovered in them the special manifestation of the creative energy of some higher power.

Charles William King

All progress in knowledge takes place through the correction of that which has been received on authority.

Margaret Benson

At times they are good and quiet company, the dead; they will not interrupt your musings, but when they speak, whether they be Jews or Turks or heathens, they will speak in a tongue all can understand. there are even countries where the moving, breathing people are less intelligible, dwell in a world further apart form you, than that silent population under the earth.

True science is at length disencumbered of the empirical determinations which had accumulated in the course of many centuries.

The belief in charms for protecting newborn infants is very strong in Greece.

James Theodore Bent

It is to the archaeologist that one must look for the completion of the outline the historian has sketched.

O. G. S. Crawford

We of America are especially fitted to visualize and to understand the marvellous transformation of a wilderness into a land of splendid cities.

James Henry Breasted

They would be our worst enemy who would wish us to live only on the glories of the past and die off from the face of the earth in sheer passivity. By continuous achievement alone we can justify our great ancestry. We do not honour our ancestors by the false claim that they are omniscient and had nothing more to learn.

Jagadish Chandra Bose

Family, clan, country, union of nations — each unit strives toward peace, toward betterment of life. Each unit of cooperation and communal life needs perfecting. No one can fix the limits of evolution. By this line of reasoning a worker becomes a creator. Let us not be frightened by the problems of creativeness. Let us find for science unencumbered paths. Thus, thought about perfectionment will be a sign of joy.

Nicholas Roerich

A skittish motorbike with a touch of blood in it is better than all the riding animals on earth, because of its logical extension of our faculties, and the hint, the provocation, to excess conferred by its honeyed untiring smoothness.