Archaeology Quotes

Archaeology

Archaeology is the study of human cultures through the recovery, documentation and analysis of material remains and environmental data, including architecture, artifacts, biofacts, human remains, and landscapes.
Contents

1 Sourced
o 1.1 Verse

2 Unsourced

3 External links

Sourced

Archaeology is destruction.
o Mortimer Wheeler Archaeology From the Earth (1954)

History is too serious to be left to historians.
o Ian Macleod, The Observer (July 16, 1961)

He that diggeth a pit, shall fall into it.
o King James Bible Proverbs 26:27,

Archaeology is the nearest history comes to shopping.
o Alan Bennett (2004) The History Boys

Verse

Dug from the tomb of taste-refining time,
Each form is exquisite, each block sublime.
Or good, or bad,—disfigur’d, or deprav’d,—
All art, is at its resurrection sav’d;
All crown’d with glory in the critic’s heav’n,
Each merit magnified, each fault forgiven.

Martin Archer Shee (1805) Rhymes on Art, or the Remonstrance of a Painter Part 2

Unsourced

My perspective is a broad one. For me, archaeologists do not discover the past; they work on what remains. Archaeology is about our relationships with what is left of the past. And more – archaeology is the discipline of things – the history of design, how people get on with the material world, materiality itself.
o Michael Shanks