Archaeologist Quotes

T. E. Lawrence

Flinders Petrie

Nicholas Roerich

Gertrude Bell

Jagadish Chandra Bose

V. Gordon Childe

Louis Leakey

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

... 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

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.

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

James Theodore Bent

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

O. G. S. Crawford

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.

We know only too well that all over the world, from wayward undergraduate to B. B. C. producer to publisher's reader there are people, otherwise sensible and sane, people who would not believe in six-headed cats and blood-curdling spectral monsters, who yet read some folly about Noah's ark or Atlantis or cataclysmic world-tides, and say, with a contented sigh, "There may be something in it, you know."

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.

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

Archaeological study is condemned to apply concepts and theories derived from elsewhere rather than to formulate its own, and is thus reduced to an appendix — at best entertaining, at worst dispensable.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.