American Archaeologist Quotes

Warren K. Moorehead

Gail Carriger

Lord Akeldama did so love to know all the gossip about the mundane world, but it was in the manner of a cat amusing himself among the butterflies without a need to interfere should their wings get torn off. They were only butterflies, after all.

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

The first Greek-speaking people in the southern Balkan Peninsula arrived in Macedonia, Thessaly, and Epirus sometime after 2600 B. C. and developed, probably due to the extreme mountainous nature of the country, their several different dialects.

David Noel Freedman

Why study this fringe area …? If one considers it worthless, lacking in veracity, won't discussing it give it more credibility than it deserves? If we ignore it, perhaps it will go away.

Stephen Williams

Source Reduction is to garbage what preventive medicine is to health.

Analogy serves to provoke certain types of questions which can, on investigation, lead to the recognition of more comprehensive ranges of order in the archaeological data.

Is it too late for salvation? If not, please let me have the analytical expertise of the New Archaeology — and the humility and common sense of the Old.

Kent V. Flannery

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.

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

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.

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

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