British Archaeologist Quotes

T. E. Lawrence

V. Gordon Childe

Louis Leakey

Mortimer Wheeler

Charles Thomas Newton

Leonard Woolley

O. G. S. Crawford

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

James Theodore Bent

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...

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.

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.

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.

The digger who will best observe and record his discoveries is precisely he who sees them as historical material and rightly appraises them: if he has not the power of synthesis and interpretation he has mistaken his calling.

Leonard Woolley

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

These works of Nature [gemstones], by their beauty and the wonderful symmetry of their primary forms, have from the very dawn of science aroused the speculations of inquiring minds, which discovered in them the special manifestation of the creative energy of some higher power.

Charles William King

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

Margaret Benson

There must always be an element of chance and of opportunism in an excavation, however carefully planned. But scientific digging is not on that account a gamble.

Mortimer Wheeler

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

Every archaeologist knows in his heart why he digs. He digs, in pity and humility, that the dead may live again, that what is past may not be forever lost, that something may be salvaged from the wreck of ages.

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

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

O. G. S. Crawford

... 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

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."

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

Lady Hester Stanhope

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

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

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

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.

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.

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