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Archeology Quotes

Browse 56 quotes about Archeology.

Archeology Quotes

“A historian reveals that excavations at Adichanalu determine that Thirai Meelar which means sea farers traveled across continents. It was considered a talent to be able to return back to the home turf. The reading led toward another instance of beauty. Tamil sailors used the same technique as sea-turtles to return home. Sea-turtles floated along sea currents but did not swim in oceans. I sit like a harbinger of tides along the coast, unaware of the migration or home, in search of sea-turtles.”

BeautyStrengthResilienceMigrationArcheologyTamilSea TurtlesSangam LiteratureExcavationsSea Farers
Author:Sneha Subramanian Kanta
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“Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, [...] came to teach [the ancient inhabitants of Mexico] the benefits of settled agriculture and the skills necessary to build temples. Although this deity is frequently depicted as a serpent, he is more often shown in human form--the serpent being his symbol and his alter ego--and is usually described as "a tall bearded white man" ... "a mysterious person ... a white man with a strong formation of body, broad forehead, large eyes and a flowing beard." Indeed, [...] the attributes and life history of Quetzalcoatl are so human that it is not improbable that he may have been an actual historical character ... the memory of whose benefactions lingered after his death, and whose personality was eventually deified. The same could very well be said of Oannes--and just like Oannes at the head of the Apkallu (likewise depicted as prominently bearded) it seems that Quetzalcoatl traveled with his own brotherhood of sages and magicians. We learn that they arrived in Mexico "from across the sea in a boat that moved by itself without paddles," and that Quetzalcoatl was regarded as having been "the founder of cities, the framer of laws and the teacher of the calendar.”

TeachCivilizationAncientMexicoArcheologyApkalluQuetzalcoatl
Book:Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization
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“Warm, gentle winds blew and blew, and the loamy soil swirled playfully about before shifting, oh, so slightly. Then, little by little, piece by piece, remnants of the City were unearthed by curious people who had come from faraway lands. A stone tablet, a shard of pottery, portions of a shattered statue and pieces of beautifully painted tiles. A bust of a woman, who could she possibly be?”

Historical FictionAncient EgyptAncient HistoryArcheologyAncient EgyptianNefertitiTutankhamunBiographical FictionAkhenatenAncient Artifacts
Book:Imagining Nefertiti
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“So far as we know, Jesus did not write anything, nor did anyone who had personal knowledge of him. There is no archaeological evidence of his existence. There are no contemporaneous accounts of his life or death: no eyewitness accounts, nor any other kind of first-hand record. All the accounts of Jesus come from decades or centuries later; the gospels themselves all come from later times, though they may contain earlier sources or oral traditions. The earliest writings that survive are the letters of Paul of Tarsus, written 20-30 years after the dates given for Jesus's death. Paul was not a companion of Jesus, nor does he ever claim to have seen Jesus before his death.”

KnowledgeHistoryArcheologyGospelsHistoricity Of JesusHistoricityEpistles Of PaulHistoricity Of The GospelsPauline EpistlesDeath Of JesusHistoricity Of The BiblePaul Of TarsusArcheological Evidence Of JesusEyewitnesses Of Jesus
Author:L. Michael White
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“You idolize peasants. You look up to island savages living “at one with Nature,” I ask you to see what happened to Margaret Mead, and how the Polynesians punked her—most of the things she wrote about their views on life, about their sexual freedom, was nonsense they made up to make her look foolish. In same way the fools like Gimbutas and others who believe that mankind at some remote point lived under a benevolent matriarchy, again, “at one with Nature,” in balance with the needs of the soil and such: sheer nonsense. Everywhere historians, archaeologists find what we thought was matriarchy was really no such thing.”

FeminismPeasantsArcheologySexual FreedomMatriarchyPolynesiansMargaret MeadGimbutasGynocracyNoble Savages
Book:Bronze Age Mindset
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“History is the collective and ancestral shit of the human race, a great big and ever-growin pile of crap. Right now we're standin at the top of it, but pretty soon we'll be buried under the doodoo of generations yet to come. That's why folks' clothes look so funny in old photographs, to name but a single example. And, as someone who's destined to be buried beneath the shit of your children and grandchildren, I think you should be just a leetle more forgiving.”

Archeology
Book:Joyland
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“When sovereignty first expands to become the general organizing principle of a society, it is by turning violence into kinship. The early, spectacular phase of mass killing in both China and Egypt, whatever else it may be doing, appears to be intended to lay the foundations of what Max Weber referred to as a ‘patrimonial system’: that is, one in which all the kings’ subjects are imagined as members of the royal household, at least to the degree that they are all working to care for the king. Turning erstwhile strangers into part of the royal household, or denying them their own ancestors, are thereby ultimately two sides of the same coin. Or to put things another way, a ritual designed to produce kinship becomes a method of producing kingship.”

PatriarchySovereigntyAnthropologyKinshipArcheologyKingship
Book:The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
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“La objetividad en el historiador es la inversion de las relaciones entre el querer y el saber y, a la vez, la creencia necesaria en la providencia, en las causas finales y en la teología. El historiador pertenece a los ascetas. "No soporto a estos concupiscentes eunucos de la historia, a todos estos reclutadores del ideal ascético; no soporto a estos sepulcros blanqueados que engendran la vida; no soporto a esos seres fatigados y abúlicos que se arropan con la sabidría y creen tener una mirada objetiva.”

Friedrich NietzscheArcheologyOn The Genealogy Of Morals
Book:Nietzsche, la Genealogía, la Historia
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“Once I went professionally to an archaeological expedition- and I learnt something there. In the course of an excavation, when something comes up out of the ground, evEryThing is cleared away very carefully all around it. You take away the loose earth, and you scare here and there with a knife until finally your object is there, all alone, ready to be drawn and photographed with no extraneous matter confusing it. That is what I have been seeking TO do- clear away the extraneous matter so that we can see the truth-the naked shining truth.”

TruthMysteryDetectiveAnalogyArcheology
Author:Agatha Christie
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“We are used to things starting out small and simple and then progressing--evolving--to become ever more complex and sophisticated, so this is naturally what we expect to find on archaeological sites. It upsets our carefully structured ideas of how civilizations should behave, how they should mature and develop, when we are confronted by a case like Göbekli Tepe that starts out perfect at the beginning and then slowly devolves until it is just a pale shadow of its former self.”

SophisticatedComplexDevelopEvolvingArcheologyCivilizationsProgressingGöbekli TepeDevolves
Book:Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization
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“Gunung Padang is not a natural hill but a man-made pyramid and the origins of construction here go back long before the end of the last Ice Age. Since the work is massive even at the deepest levels, and bears witness to the kinds of sophisticated construction skills that were deployed to build the pyramids of Egypt, or the largest megalithic sites of Europe, I can only conclude that we're looking at the work of a lost civilization and a fairly advanced one.”

CivilizationConstructionIce AgeArcheologyMan MadePyramidMegalithicGunung Padang
Author:Danny Hilman Natawidjaja
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“What would have made [seeing Göbekli Tepe from Harran] easier, in antiquity, would have been a tall tower annexed to the temple that once stood here--a temple dedicated to Su-En (usually contracted to Sin), the Moon God of the Sabians. After telling us that there were "powerful images in this temple," the Greek Philosopher Libanius (AD 314-394), describes the tower, noting that "from its top one could overlook the entire plain of Harran." [...] A team from the Chicago Oriental Institute was about to start a major dig around the ruins of the Grand Mosque in 1986, but it seems that the Turkish authorities insisted on such restrictive practices that the project had to be abandoned. Current excavations by Harran University and the Sanliurfa Museum Directorate show little interest in recovery of substantive remains from the city's pre-Islamic period.”

RuinsAbandonedArcheologyDigGöbekli TepeSabiansHarran
Book:Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization
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“As they stepped out onto the bustling boulevard, the glow of the city lights reflected their shared sense of wonder. Paris, with its endless contradictions and eternal allure, was not just their backdrop but their muse, inspiring them to keep asking, keep seeking, and keep dreaming.”

FictionHistoryFantasyAdventureScience FictionContemporaryParisHistorical FictionAncient HistoryArcheology
Book:The Heirs of the Lost Legacy: A Modern Odyssey in a Forgotten Past
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“The fullest account we have of Oannes is found in surviving fragments of the works of a Babylonian priest called Berossos who wrote in the third century BC. [...] Oannes did not do his work alone but was supposedly the leader of a group of beings known as the Seven Apkallu--the "Seven Sages"--who were said to have lived "before the flood" (a cataclysmic global deluge features prominently in many Mesopotamian traditions, including those of Sumer, Akkad, Assyria and Babylon). Alongside Oannes, these sages are portrayed as bringers of civilization who, in the most ancient past, gave humanity a moral code, arts, crafts and agriculture and taught them architectural, building and engineering skills.”

PastHumanityCivilizationFloodArcheologyCataclysmApkalluSeven Sages
Book:Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization
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“[At Gunung Padang] First, the drill cores contained evidence--fragments of worked columnar basalt--that more man-made megalithic structures lay far beneath the surface. Secondly, the organic materials brought up in the drill cores began to yield older and older dates--3000 BC to 5000 BC, then 9600 BC as the drills bit deeper, then around 11,000 BC, then 15,000 BC and finally, at depths of 27.5 meters (90 feet) and more, an astonishing sequence of dates of 20,000 BC to 22,000 BC and earlier.”

EvidenceArcheologyMan MadeMegalithic StructuresGunung PadangCarbon Dating
Book:Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization
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“[At Gunung Padang] First, the drill cores contained evidence--fragments of worked columnar basalt--that more man-made megalithic structures lay far beneath the surface. Secondly, the organic materials brought up in the drill cores began to yield older and older dates--3000 BC to 5000 BC, then 9600 BC as the drills bit deeper, then around 11,000 BC, then 15,000 BC and finally, at depths of 27.5 meters (90 feet) and more, an astonishing sequence of dates of 20,000 BC to 22,000 BC and earlier. [...] The problem is that those dates going back before 9600 BC take us deep into the last Ice Age, when Indonesia was not a series of islands as it is today but was part of a vast antediluvian Southeast Asian continent dubbed "Sundaland" by geologists. Sea level was 122 meters (400 feet) lower then. Huge ice caps 3.2 kilometers (2 miles) deep covered most of Europe and North America until the ice caps began to melt. Then all the water stored in them returned to the oceans and sea-level rose, submerging many parts of the world where humans had previously lived.”

EvidenceIce AgeArcheologyMan MadeMegalithic StructuresAntediluvianGunung PadangCarbon Dating
Book:Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization
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“Hmmm, it is a small pelvis with a very ample sub-pubic angle; at least ninety degrees...the bones are delicate, fine, graceful...hmmm..." With certainty born of profound expertise and his uncanny ability to dialogue with bones, Romano stated his conclusion without touching anything. "It is a woman." (Arturo Romano Pacheco, physical anthropologist)”

ScienceHistoryAnthropologyArcheologyAncient Sites
Book:The Controversial Mayan Queen: Sak K'uk of Palenque
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“The transit lanes were full of pathetic alien junk abandoned by the survivors in the aftermath of the war: personal effects, robbed of place and purpose and cultural definition, hard to identify in terms of human equivalence as the belt-buckles, book-ends or athletic trophies they undoubtedly were. Tiny, with the brain of a jackdaw and all the moral sensibility of a maggot in a cemetery, had been pocketing the shiner bits as he went along, exclaiming "Look at that, Truck!" and "Hey, someone's kicking himself for losing this!”

WarLootingArcheology
Book:The Centauri Device
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“Dying is easy, beloved. It is living that is difficult. The secret is to live fully, to embrace every instant of existence, beautiful and ugly, blissful and painful. And remember to dance between the worlds, for that is your heritage as a child of the infinite Oneness.”

Archeology2012Ancient MayaMaya Wisdom
Book:Dreaming the Maya Fifth Sun: A Novel of Maya Wisdom and the 2012 Shift in Consciousness
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“I think [Wine] will be, at a minimum, incredibly useful to archeology, like DosBox has been for playing Wing Commander. Certainly it has been known to save the day with modern titles, too. But to have it as the agreed-upon way to how you play video games on Linux is completely unacceptable for several reasons, both technical and moral.”

ThinkingWayHas BeensReasonPlayGamesKnownMoralModernWineWingsVideoTitlesMinimumCommandersLinuxArcheology
Author:Ryan C. Gordon
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“We develop all our sciences, archeology, cosmology, psychology, we tabulate and classify and cling to our sacred definitions, our divisions, without any attempt to synthesis, without the humility to see that these are only parts of a total knowledge. ... But somehow we ought to be able to keep the idea of the totality of experience and knowledge at the back of our minds even though the front's busy from morning til night with the life cycle of the liver fluke.”

MindIdeasAbleNightKnowledgeMorningPsychologyFrontsHumilityOughtSacredBusyDefinitionsCyclesDivisionCosmologyTotalityLiverSynthesisSpecializationFlukesArcheology
Author:Maureen Duffy
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“We still have to realize that if you are say a historian of the Civil War, you don’t know anything special about say Columbus or for that matter the 20th century. You are a consumer of that information, especially if it’s stuff like Columbus and the American Indians. That information isn’t even in history, much of it. Much of it is in anthropology or archeology.”

IfsKnowsStillsWarMatterStuffRealizingSpecialCenturyInformationConsumersCivil WarHistorian20th CenturyAnthropologyAmerican IndianColumbusArcheology
Author:James W. Loewen
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“You have a lot to learn, young man. Philosophy. Theology. Literature. Poetry. Drama. History. Archeology. Anthropology. Mythology. Music. These are your tools as much as brush and pigment. You cannot be an artist until you are civilized. You cannot be civilized until you learn. To be civilized is to know where you belong in the continuum of our art and your world. To surmount the past, you must know the past.”

KnowsMenWorldArtPhilosophyPastYoungArtistLiteratureDramaToolsMythologyTheologyYoung ManCivilizedBrushesAnthropologyContinuumArcheologyPigmentWhere You Belong
Book:Red
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“The careful scholarship of the dedicated amateur mycophile R. Gordon Wasson reads like an exciting scientific detective story. Moreover, his willingness to pursue the quest through the wide range of linguistics, archeology, folklore, philology, ethnobotany, plant ecology, human physiology, and prehistory constitutes an object lesson to all holistic professional students of man.”

MenHumansStoriesObjectsStudentsLessonsExcitingPlantCarefulWidePursueRangeWillingnessDedicatedQuestsEcologyDetectivesScholarshipFolkloreHolisticLinguisticsPhysiologyDetective StoriesArcheologyPrehistoryPhilology
Author:Weston La Barre
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