20th-century Archaeologist Quotes

V. Gordon Childe

Louis Leakey

Zahi Hawass

William F. Albright

Fred Vargas

Robert Ballard

Peter Glob

As scientists, we keep an open mind, but we have to base our ideas about the past on archaeological evidence.

One has to see a great number of implements, classify them, see them again several times, before one acquires a "typological eye."

François Bordes

Elie Wiesel has for years served as the moral compass of the civilized world. For many of us, including me, he has defined the Holocaust.

Like its sister discipline, sociocultural anthropology, prehistory has a tendency to invent a term for its own sake and then argue about what it means for twenty years rather than defining the term in the first place.

Inference is the key or the methodological pivot of archaeology, for it is only through inference that inanimate objects are reassembled into the milieu of life. Inferences are drawn from analogies.

The simplest kind of decision is binary: that is, the question can be answered, in principle at least, by either yes or no.

Elizabeth Wayland Barber

To archaeologists, the human past is owned by no one. It represents the cultural heritage of everyone who has ever lived on Earth or will live on it in the future. Archaeology puts all human societies on an equal footing.

The word pharmakon, whence pharmacy is derived, meant in Greek not only medicament, poison, or magical procedure, but also that which is slain to expiate the crimes of a city, like the scapegoat of Biblical times.... In other words, it meant "what carries off disease."

Paul Ghalioungui

At a time when most think of outer space as the final frontier, we must remember that a great deal of unfinished business remains here on earth.

Archaeology is rather like a vast, fiendish jigsaw puzzle invented by the devil as an instrument of tantalizing torment, since: (a) it will never be finished (b) you don't know how many pieces are missing (c) most of them are lost forever (d) you can't cheat by looking at the picture.

There can be no doubt that archaeology has confirmed the substantial historicity of Old Testament tradition. Divergences from basic historical fact may nearly all be explained as due to the nature of oral tradition, to the vicissitudes of written transmission, and to honest, but erroneous combinations on the part of Israelite and Jewish scholars.

William F. Albright

Almost every statement in prehistory should be qualified by the phrase: 'On the evidence available today the balance of probability favors the view that'.

V. Gordon Childe

Any attempt on the part of the archaeologist to contribute to the larger problems of cultural understanding was met with an astonishment like that in the classic case of the "talking dog"; it was not what the dog said that was so amazing but the fact that he could do it at all.

Progress in science depends not only upon new data but also upon the careful elaboration of new approaches to old data as well as new.

A whole range of activities remained largely unregulated, spontaneously generating separate forms of organisation, and existing independently of any consecrated 'official' To overlook the extent of private initiative would be to ignore a major impulse to early Christian expansion. In homes, whole families adopted a style of life modelled on the Apostles...

The ground is like a beautiful woman. If you treat her gently, she'll tell you all her secrets.

Classificatory systems are merely tools, tools of analysis, manufactured and employed by students, just as shovels, trowels and whisk brooms are tools of excavation.

As to analogy, archaeology as a whole is analogy, for to claim any knowledge other than the objects themselves is to assume knowledge of patterns in culture and history and to apply these patterns to the facts.

Kwang-chih Chang

To excavate is to open a book written in the language that the centuries have spoken into the earth.

Spyridon Marinatos

... if scientists could get rid of the mental block which prevents them investigating a vast subject right under their noses, they could soon learn a great deal more than my wife and I are capable of doing.

Thomas Charles Lethbridge

And we know from countless examples, from what we later call literature, that anyone can be a great writer.

Colonial governors and senior civil servants are not easy people to argue with, and I was not popular because of my criticism of the colonial service in Kenya.

Civilisation as a term suggests human agency. Things don't come together organically.

Discourse occurs at the silent level of the artefact and is continuously presenced in the world as such. It is a discourse which is not, and cannot be, articulated in speech.

Christopher Tilley

The world of fantasy fills the gaps in people's knowledge.