Archaeologist Quotes

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

... 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

It takes an unusually philosophic mind to accept that all one's suffering might be to no end, really, in the larger scheme of things.

Ian Cameron Esslemont

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

A drawing, brought by Colonel Coombs, from a sculptured column in a cave-temple in the South of India, represents the first pair at the foot of the ambrosial tree, and a serpent entwined among the heavily-laden boughs, presenting to them some of the fruit from his mouth.

Godfrey Higgins

A skittish motorbike with a touch of blood in it is better than all the riding animals on earth, because of its logical extension of our faculties, and the hint, the provocation, to excess conferred by its honeyed untiring smoothness.

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

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

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

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

It is true that the Rigveda does not provide us details of the inner layout of these forts, but surely the text was not meant to be a treatise on Vastusastra. May it be remembered that it is essentially a compilation of prayers to gods and should be looked at as such. All the evidence that it provides regarding the material culture of the then people is only incidental.

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 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

All progress in knowledge takes place through the correction of that which has been received on authority.

Margaret Benson

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.

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

O. G. S. Crawford

Finding modern children's names ridiculous:

The new names, Free-gift, Reformation, Earth, Dust, Ashes, Delivery… which have lately been given by some to their children.

The only inequalities that matter begin in the mind. It is not income levels but differences in mental equipment that keep people apart, breed feelings of inferiority.

Jacquetta Hawkes

Nobody is such a fool as to moider away his time in the slip-slop conversation of a pack of women.

Lady Hester Stanhope

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.

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.

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.

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

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

James Theodore Bent