Archaeologist Quotes

I'm an Egyptologist. I'm a remote sensing specialist, and I'm a space archaeologist. ~ Sarah Parcak

Whether we are reading the Bible for the first time or standing in a field in Israel next to a historian and an archaeologist and a scholar, the Bible meets us where we are. That is what truth does ~ Rob Bell

I've lived here ... my whole life. It's where I lost all my baby teeth. Where tiny hamster, gerbil, and bird skeletons lie in rotted-out cardboard coffins beneath the oak tree in our backyard. Also where, if some future archaeologist goes digging, they'll find the remains of a plush toy: a gray terrier named Toto I buried after the accident. ~ Jennifer McMahon

To excavate a pyramid is the dream of every archaeologist. ~ Sarah Parcak

The geologist takes up the history of the earth at the point where the archaeologist leaves it, and carries it further back into remote antiquity. ~ Bal Gangadhar Tilak

Strike was used to playing archaeologist among the ruins of people's traumatised memories; ~ Robert Galbraith

Science is just as important as magic. ~ Donna Grant

It isn't just you. It's the whole Galaxy. Pirenne heard Lord Dorwin's idea of scientific research. Lord Dorwin thought the way to be a good archaeologist was to read all the books on the subject - written by men who were dead for centuries. He thought that the way to solve archaeological puzzles was to weigh the opposing authorities. And Pirenne listened and made no objections. Don't you see that there's something wrong with that? ~ Isaac Asimov

Calm down please, sir, if you will,' said the bobby, still retaining a firm hold upon the horse's reins. ' "Stolen" is such an ugly word. It is not technically stealing if you are a British archaeologist and you acquire items of historical significance in the savage realms and liberate them to civilisation. ~ Robert Rankin

I was a bad student. I liked archaeology actually, I was interested in maybe becoming an archaeologist but I was such a bad student and had such bad grades that I wasn't going to get into any really good college so I fell back on acting. ~ Ben Stiller

The lure of the past came up to grab me. To see a dagger slowly appearing, with its gold glint, through the sand was romantic. The carefulness of lifting pots and objects from the soil filled me with a longing to be an archaeologist myself. ~ Agatha Christie

I originally worked as an archaeologist in North Carolina, and when bones were found police would take them out to the bones lady at the university, and that was me. ~ Kathy Reichs

Gunner Ainslie made a face at his sister-in-law. "'Amateur' is a bit rough, Alice. I took a degree in archaeology, after all."
She looked even more confused. "Then why are you a photographer now instead of an archaeologist?"
"Because he didn't want to be a burden to the estate like all my other siblings," his brother Elliott, the current Baron Ainslie, answered, giving his wife a squeeze. "Or so he said. Frankly, I think it was a cover so he could take pictures of unclothed women. ~ Katie MacAlister

Here the artist is, as it were, an archaeologist, uncovering deeper and deeper strata as he works, recovering not an ancient civilization, but something as yet unborn, unseen, unheard, except by the inner eye, the inner ear. He is not just removing apparent surfaces from some external object, he is removing apparent surface from the Self, revealing his original nature. ~ Stephen Nachmanovitch

I write - poignantly, in the most heartfelt way - about how I miss her and how I detest my life in this school and she responds with detailed plans for her future life as an archaeologist or philosopher or - new, this - a veterinary surgeon. ~ William Boyd

The most exciting moment as an archaeologist happened when I was looking at the great archaeology site of Tannis, which of course we all know from 'Indiana Jones.' We got satellite imagery of the city of Tannis, we processed it, and literally from thousands of miles away from my lab in Alabama, we were able to map the entire city. ~ Sarah Parcak

If you really want to be a good archaeologist, you have to understand ancient DNA; you have to understand chemical analysis to figure out the composition of ancient pots. You have to be able to study human remains. You need to be able to do computer processing and, in some cases, computer programming. ~ Sarah Parcak

You're an archaeologist. Truth comes finally into the light. It's in the bones and sediment.

It's in character and nuance and mood.

That is what governs us in our lives, that's not the truth.

For the living it is the truth. ~ Michael Ondaatje

Future civilizations - better civilizations than this one - are going to judge all men by the extent to which they've been artists. You and I, if some future archaeologist finds our works miraculously preserved in some city dump, will be judged by the quality of our creations. Nothing else about us will matter. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

An exercise for the reader: Who would win in a scavenger hunt, 20th century archaeologist Indiana Jones or 51st century archaeologist River Song? ~ Stephen H. Segal

After I graduated from the University of Glasgow, I was a self-employed archaeologist going from dig to dig around Scotland, and it was not well-paid. I was an excavator, not a lecturer as well, so paying rent on a flat was tricky. In the end I decided to retrain as a journalist as I couldn't see a future in it. ~ Neil Oliver

One gleeful headline drives me to the floor, kneeling,
and all paint turns to gazette paper and all memory
collides into photographs we could not say happened,
that is us, that's what we did. When you lose you become
ancient but this time no one will rake over these bodies
gently collecting their valuables, their pots, their hearts
and intestines, their papers and what they could bury.
This civilisation will be dug up to burn all its manifestos.
No tender archaeologist will mend our furious writings
concluding, "They wanted sweat to taste sweet, that is all,
some of them played music for nothing, some of them
wrote poems to tractors, rough hands, and rough roads,
some sang for no reason at all to judge by their condition. ~ Dionne Brand

an Afghan archaeologist followed the Taliban through the museum, "pleading for mercy as if begging for the lives of [his] own children."14 Such pleas were meaningless to those who felt their axes swung with God's weight behind them. ~ Karima Bennoune

I would have been an archaeologist or something, maybe a historian. There are a lot of things I would have liked to have done differently, but everything that happened to me made me the person I am today. No matter how negative it seemed at the time or whatever hardship it seemed to have been at that time, Im just the sum of all those amazing experiences. ~ Chaka Khan

But the attitude that Viking society held up as the ideal one was a heroic stoicism. In the words of archaeologist Neil Price, "The outcome of our actions, our fate, is already decided and therefore does not matter. What is important is the manner of our conduct as we go to meet it." You couldn't change what was going to happen to you, but you could at least face it with honor and dignity. The best death was to go down fighting, preferably with a smile on your lips. Life is precarious by nature, but this was especially true in the Viking Age, which made this fatalism, and stoicism in the face of it, especially poignant.
The model of this ideal was Odin's amassing an army in Valhalla in preparation for Ragnarok. He knew that Fenrir, "the wolf", was going to murder him one way or another. Perhaps on some level he hoped that by gathering all of the best warriors to fight alongside him, he could prevent the inevitable. But deep down he knew that his struggle was hopeless - yet he determined to struggle just the same, and to die in the most radiant blaze of glory he could muster. ~ Daniel McCoy

One graduate student told me, "When the Apocalypse comes, you want to know an archaeologist, because we know how to make fire, catch food, and create hill forts," and I promptly added her to my address book. Knows how to make hill forts - who can say when that will come in handy? ~ Marilyn Johnson

What is amazing to me as an archaeologist is that the more and more I study, I realize we are resilient, we are creative, we are brilliant, and this is what makes us human, and that hasn't changed since we've been human. ~ Sarah Parcak

If you get a chance you should marry an archaeologist. I don't suppose there are too many to go around, but it's the best sort of husband to have. The older a woman gets, the more he's interested in her. ~ Menna Van Praag

I'm not an academic; I'm not an archaeologist. I'm a writer, communicating ideas to the public. There is a model of how the past is, and a lot of academic archaeology is about refining the model. It's not about changing the model radically. I'm not aware of any current which is about radically changing the model. It's just me, really. ~ Graham Hancock

It would be ironic for an archaeologist to catch something nasty from the past, perhaps the ultimate in experimental archaeology! ~ Paul G. Bahn

What kind of archaeologist carries a weapon? ~ Jack O'Neill

I have a habit of being an archaeologist of my own past, a sentimental collector of personal artefacts which may at first glance appear random, but each of which holds a unique significance. As the years pass me by, I find that the number of objects within my possession begins to accumulate. A torn map. A sealed letter. A boat full of paper animals. Each item encapsulates within itself a story, akin to an outward manifestation of my inner journey. ~ Agnes Chew

While growing up in Baltimore, Maryland, I dreamed of becoming many things: an archaeologist, an ambassador, an actor, an author. ~ Karen Hesse

Approximately eight hundred skeletons from the Dickson Mounds in the lower Illinois Valley have been analyzed. They reveal a clear picture of the health changes that accompanied the shift from foraging to corn farming around 1200 AD. Archaeologist George Armelagos and his colleagues reported that the farmers' remains show a 50 percent increase in chronic malnutrition, and three times the incidence of infectious diseases (indicated by bone lesions) compared with the foragers who preceded them. Furthermore, they found evidence of increased infant mortality, delayed skeletal growth in adults, and a fourfold increase in porotic hyperostosis, indicating iron-deficiency anemia in more than half the population. ~ Christopher Ryan

I am an archaeologist of mature vintage. Rapid descents are not my specialty. I am the plodding type."
~ Grace Madison, PhD. ~ N.L.B. Horton

If I could sum up my poetry in a few well-chosen words, the result might be a poem. Several years ago, when I was asked to say something on this topic, I came up with the notion that for me the making of poems is both a commemoration (a moment captured) and an evocation (the archaeologist manqué side of me digging into something buried and bringing it to light). But I also said that I find the processes that bring poems into being mysterious, and I wouldn't really wish to know them; the thread that links the first unwilled impulse to the object I acknowledge as the completed poem is a tenuous one, easily broken. If I knew the answers to these riddles, I would write more poems, and better ones. "Simple Poem" is as close as I can get to a credo':

Simple Poem

I shall make it simple so you understand.
Making it simple will make it clear for me.
When you have read it, take me by the hand
As children do, loving simplicity.

This is the simple poem I have made.
Tell me you understand. But when you do
Don't ask me in return if I have said
All that I meant, or whether it is true. ~ Anthony Thwaite

You should always carry string, according to my archaeologist father, because then you could at least make a trap to catch animals to survive. According to my grandmother, it was clean underwear. ~ Ted Danson

One of the most important finds within the land of Egypt occurred when the Egyptologist and archaeologist Professor Walter B. Emery (1903-1971) was excavating tombs at the necropolis of Saqqara, one of the oldest cities in the land. There Professor Emery discovered men with blond hair and fair complexions. These individuals were revered and honored by the Egyptians as specially endowed elite. ~ Michael Tsarion

Archaeologist, adventurer - I saw the Indiana Jones movies. They are the same. ~ Christina Dodd

I've never seen novels as built things. I have a tendency to see them as found things so that I always feel a little bit like an archaeologist who's working to get some fragile fossil out of the ground. And the more you get out unbroken, the better you succeed. ~ Stephen King

[Agatha Christie] is fond of quoting the witty wife who once said, 'an archaeologist is the best husband any woman can have; the older she gets, the more interested he is in her.
Christie's husband, Max Mallowan, was an archaeologist. ~ Nigel Dennis

You're kind of a psycho. I get that."
"I might be," Monica agreed, and gave her a slow, strange smile. "You're one smart little freak. Now run away, smart little freak, before I change my mind and stick you in one of these old suitcases for some architect to find a hundred years from now."
Claire blinked. "Archaeologist."
Monica's eyes turned winter cold. "Oh, you'd better start running away now. ~ Rachel Caine

Do you realize that a middle-class couple, one archaeologist, one dolls' expert, can't move from their house because ancient spirits are blocking them in? It's a reasonable sort of day's experience, isn't it? ~ Robert Holdstock

We look to the archaeologist for the materials, to the artist for the method. ~ Oscar Wilde

Before I settled on music, I wanted to be an archaeologist, an astronaut, all sorts of really diverse things. ~ Joan Jett

I go back and research, say, every reference to the Gorgons, and I find what the classical writers said about them and it's so much richer than you might get in an average Greek mythology text. I feel like an archaeologist - I'm dusting off these things that people have not seen for thousands of years and bringing them into the modern world. ~ Rick Riordan

I've got to get the ultimate in composition today. or I've got to get the ultimate in light, I'll stay here until it appears. I was not making any demands. I went purely to see what would come, what might be there. I didn't have to be archaeologist or historian or tourist, I just needed to be available. ~ Paul Caponigro

The moreness of him was beginning to show. The way ruins were excavated by an archaeologist. Brushstroke by brushstroke. Bit by bit. ~ Ryan Graudin

An archaeologist is a ghoul with credentials. ~ Robert Shea