Top 31 Archaeologists Quotes & Sayings

We need to be moral archaeologists to pull out how we understand the world

We're addicted to this concept of civilization - we can't imagine living outside of it because we've had it for 10,000 years, all of what we call history. But according to archaeologists, humanity has been on this planet for millions of years in indigenous form.

Archaeologists have used aerial photographs to map archaeological sites since the 1920s, while the use of infrared photography started in the 1960s, and satellite imagery was first used in the 1970s.

In becoming archaeologists of the world of our mothers, we are trying to retrieve the female past and to invent a future.

Every bride and groom in the history of civilization has gained weight after their wedding day. It is only a matter of time until archaeologists unearth a married caveman who's wearing a pair of old tux pants that were so tight he couldn't get the zipper closed.

I realized that I didn't know much about Krishna. I wondered how he became an icon. So I met archaeologists and read up more on him.

Archaeologists use datasets from NASA and commercial satellites, processing the information using various off-the-shelf computer programs. These datasets allow us to see beyond the visible part of the light spectrum into the near, middle, and far infrared.

I will tell you a little secret about archaeologists, dear Reader. They all pretend t be very high-minded. They claim that their sole aim in excavation is to uncover the mysteries of the past and add to the store of human knowledge. They lie. What they really want is a spectacular discovery, so they can get their names in the newspapers and inspire envy and hatred in the hearts of their rivals.

Museums, museums, object-lessons rigged out to illustrate the unsound theories of archaeologists, crazy attempts to co-ordinate and get into a fixed order that which has no fixed order and will not be co-coordinated! It is sickening! Why must all experience be systematized? A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.

Historians and archaeologists will one day discover that the ads of our time are the richest and most faithful reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities.

The most I can hope for is to die in a pose that confuses future archaeologists.

The Gospel of Thomas, greatly favored in some circles, is ignored by archaeologists, primarily because it exhibits no verisimilitude. It tells us nothing about the historical Jesus and the world he and his disciples lived in. I've heard it said, that if all we had was the Gospel of Thomas, would we even know that Jesus was Jewish?

Yesterday in Egypt, archaeologists discovered the burial site for the 50 children of Ramses II...Fifty children! What I want to know is, who decided to name a condom after this guy?

You know, many people believe that we archaeologists are just a collection of old fogies digging around in the ruins after old dried up skulls and bones.

Painters were also attorneys, happy storytellers of anecdote, psychologists, botanists, zoologists, archaeologists, engineers, but there were no creative painters.

Archaeologists have been digging up thousands of graves of people called Scythians by the Greeks. They turn out to be people whose women fought, hunted, rode horses, used bows and arrows, just like the men.

Archaeologists are underpaid publicity agents for deceased royalty.

Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become a study for archaeologists...but it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio.

All archaeologists in Israel and Palestine make use of the New Testament Gospels. They do this because the Gospels exhibit verisimilitude. In short, the Gospels help archaeologists know where to dig and they help archaeologists understand what they unearth. The 2nd-century Gospels and Gospel-like writings rarely exhibit verisimilitude, so archaeologists rarely appeal to them.

When a wall is slowly covered over by earth, the materials it's made from decay and become part of the soils around and above it, sometimes causing vegetation above and next to the wall to grow faster or slower. Satellite imagery helps archaeologists to pick up these subtle changes.

It is from Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting incendiary manifesto of ours. With it, today, we establish Futurism, because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians.

Once archaeologists have shown possible 'new' ancient features, they can import the data into their iPads and take it to the field to do survey or excavation work. Technology doesn't mean we aren't digging in the dirt anymore - it's just that we know better where to dig.

When future archaeologists dig up the remains of California, they're going to find all of those gyms their scary-looking gym equipment, and they're going to assume that we were a culture obsessed with torture.

Archaeologists have made discoveries that challenge fundamental traditions of Judaism as well as those of Christianity and Islam.

I think archaeologists are stuck, and we are losing our past at a very rapid rate. Tens of thousands of sites will be lost, and we've only unveiled a tiny percent of the past.

As I leafed through the book in front of me and watched the dust swirl in the air, I wondered if maybe there was some evil dormant virus in the pages that would infect me, like the mummy dust that used to kill archaeologists. Death by research. That was not a glorious end.

In the past 20 years scientists from very diverse disciplines - anthropologists, archaeologists, sociologists, psychologists - have all moved to a much more hopeful, optimistic view of human nature.

Archaeologists gave the military the idea to use aerial photographs for spying and field survey. We are fortunate that the spatial and spectral resolutions of the imagery available to us are so broadly useful for archaeology.

Seeing sites and features in places where we never looked or never thought things might exist is causing archaeologists across the world to think deeper about their sites or entire cultures.

The tasks of paleontologists and classical historians and archaeologists are remarkably similar - to excavate, decipher and bring to life the tantalizing remnants of a time we will never see.

When archaeologists discover the missing arms of Venus de Milo, they will find she was wearing boxing gloves.