Anthropologist Quotes

To gather and describe antiquities, although thoroughly and intelligently done, is by no means all of archaeology. True, these are to archaeology what the unfashioned and unadjusted materials of which the house is to be built are to the house, but they are not the house.

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
It must be made possible for the one to live vicariously the life of the many from the beginning.

Religion is a disease. It is born of fear; it compensates through hate in the guise of authority, revelation. Religion, enthroned in a powerful social organization, can become incredibly sadistic. No religion has been more cruel than the Christian.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A lizard maiden Was thirsty and crying. A gila monster ran up And comforted her. The maiden stopped crying. The monster carried her off And took her to wife.

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

Nonliterate societies represent the end results of many different experiments carried out by nature.

The residue of possible findings is a sort of condensed social history.

Alfred L. Kroeber
Alfred L. Kroeber
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.

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.

So, in short, the real equipment of an archaeologist is a scientific mind.

Clark Wissler
Clark Wissler
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.

Whoever wins to a great scientific truth will find a poet before him in the quest.

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!

At the end of a long day's march, one of the soldiers, hot, thirsty and utterly weary, was heard to exclaim: "What did God Almighty make such a country for?" To which one of his companions made the reply that "God Almighty made the country good enough, but it's this infernal geology that the professor talks about that has spoiled it all."

George Bird Grinnell
George Bird Grinnell
A scientist who is no longer capable of framing a hypothesis — or never was — is not a scientist but a methodological fossil.

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.

There are no closed frontiers between intellectual approaches. Only closed minds which refuse to cross them.

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

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