English Archaeologist Quotes

Flinders Petrie

Gertrude Bell

William Camden

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.

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.

To archaeologists, the human past is owned by no one. It represents the cultural heritage of everyone who has ever lived on Earth or will live on it in the future. Archaeology puts all human societies on an equal footing.

In few kinds of work are the results so directly dependent on the personality of the worker as they are in excavating. The old saying that a man finds what he looks for in a subject, is too true; or if he has not enough insight to ensure finding what he looks for, it is at least sadly true that he does not find anything that he does not look for.

Flinders Petrie

Archaeology differs from history in... that it has to do only with existing remains explained by history, while [history] has to do with the things that have been, without regard to whether there are any visible remains or not.

John Henry Parker