20th-century Anthropologist Quotes

Archaeologists are, by necessity, masters of inference. From the meanest, most innocuous of things-discarded oyster shells, broken pots, the subtle bands of color and texture in an excavation wall—we try to re-create an entire world and its inhabitants.

If Africa was the cradle of mankind, it was only an indifferent kindergarten. Europe and Asia were our principal schools.

Carleton S. Coon
Carleton S. Coon
Archaeology by its formal etymology, is the study of the old; and the old, more often than not, is buried. As a result, archaeologists have traditionally been concerned with the subterranean world. Like Lewis Carroll's Alice, they are confronted with the curious underground world, and attempt to understand and explain it.

Prophets and artists tend to be liminal and marginal people, "edgemen," who strive with a passionate sincerity to rid themselves of the clichés associated with status incumbency and role-playing and to enter into vital relations with other men in fact or imagination. In their productions we may catch glimpses of that unused evolutionary potential in mankind which has not yet been externalized and fixed in structure.

If the Koran is the soul of Islam, then perhaps the institution of the Muslim family might be described as its body.

Always think of the consequences of your actions both in the field and in the laboratory.

A real past, although blurred, can be glimpsed through archaeological materials.

I want to set the example my mother set for me: a strong female role model who faces challenges takes risks and conquers fears. I want my children to know that as women they can do whatever they dream as long as they believe in themselves. More than anything it is my responsibility to instill in my daughters the knowledge that they can have a family and everything else too.

The smell of roasting meat together with that of burning fruit wood and dried herbs, as voluptuous as incense in a church, is enough to turn anyone into a budding gastronome

If it's working, keep doing it. If it's not working, stop doing it. If you don't know what to do, don't do anything.

Melvin Konner
Melvin Konner
American archaeology is ready to be a mature science, one that accepts the primacy of its empirical data — for these can outlast theories — and the political and human ramifications of its actions, as it reflectively constructs and compares interpretations. Tolerance for ambiguity is as essential as the Marshalltown trowel.

Hominids typically haven't so much adapted to change, as they have accommodated to it.

Ian Tattersall
Ian Tattersall
No branch of anthropology requires more inference, or the weighing of imponderables; in short, the exercise of the scientific imagination, than prehistory.

Soul food is more than chidins and collard greens, ham hocks and black-eyed peas. Soul food is about a people who have a lot of heart and soul.

Science, like organic life, has ramified by expanding into unoccupied areas and then adapting itself to the special requirements encountered there.

The African presence in America before Columbus is of importance not only to African and American history but to the history of world civilizations. It provides further evidence that all great civilizations and races are heavily indebted to one another and that no race has a monopoly on enterprise and inventive genius.

We know now that cultures are not oral or literate; rather they employ a menu or spectrum of communicative strategies, some of them associated with texts, some with voices, and some with both.

Archeology per se is no more than a method and a set of specialized techniques for the gathering of cultural information. The archeologist, as archeologist, is really nothing but a technician.

I personally cannot discern a shred of evidence for "[intelligent] design." If 97% of all creatures have gone extinct, some plan isn't working very well!

Fallen man is both terrified of vulnerability and committed to maintaining independence.

Death is not a self-evident phenomenon. The margins between life and death are socially and culturally constructed, mobile, multiple, and open to dispute and reformulation.

Ultimately, of what possible social significance is it if a person likes to masturbate over a shoe? It may even be non-consensual, but since we do not ask permission of our shoes to wear them, it hardly seems necessary to obtain dispensation to come on them.

Gayle Rubin
Gayle Rubin
Since science has no value agenda of its own it is always subject to hijacking by fanaticism and idealism.

And I thought how sad it was that, for all our sophisticated intellect, for all our noble aspirations, our aggressive behavior was not just similar in many ways to that of the chimpanzees - it was even worse. Worse because human beings have the potential to rise above their baser instincts, whereas chimpanzees probably do not.

Jane Goodall
Jane Goodall
It is frustrating to know, on the one hand, that every living thing on earth will have had a single, unique history—whether it be the life of an individual, of a civilization, of a species, of a diverse evolutionary group—and, on the other, to be constantly in the position of trying to discover it.