Michael Rostovtzeff Quotes

What is a historian, anyway? It is someone who uses facts to record the development of humanity.

In archaeology, context is everything. Objects allow us to reconstruct the past. Taking artifacts from a temple or an ancient private house is like emptying out a time capsule.

History is sometimes hard. We study it and try to discover facts.

History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and only in a very limited sense by establishing strict causal connections.

As scientists, we keep an open mind, but we have to base our ideas about the past on archaeological evidence.

Most people in archeology find their specialties in strange and unique ways. I always wanted to do archaeology, and then the time came for me to actually be in the field, and it was excruciatingly boring. Excavation is really, really boring.

Now, whenever you read any historical document, you always evaluate it in light of the historical context.

The only thing that interests me is history - reviewing the past and making something out of it.

As a historian, what I trust is my ability to take a mass of information and tell a story shaped around it.

Well, we could tell them that we're here on an archeological expedition.

I would really love to go on an archaeological dig.

The historian is terribly responsible to what he can discern are the facts of the case, but he's nothing if he doesn't make out a case.

Historian - a broad-gauge gossip.

In reconstructing the past, historians generally are compelled to rely on accounts written after the event by participants and witnesses, or on the hearsay versions of those who learned at second-hand what had occurred. Such writings are subject to the infirmities of recollection, or of bias arising from allegiance to one side or the other.

History consists of facts attested to by evidence.

Historians usually record events based on the time and date of when they occurred.

I've found numerous things - settlements, temples, possible pyramids, forts, roads - the list goes on and on. I'm not as interested in the discoveries as the types of questions they help us formulate.

When you think about archaeology, archaeology is the only field that allows us to tell the story of 99 percent of our history prior to 3,000 B.C. and writing.

I studied archaeology.

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.

As anyone who has watched Time Team will know, the context is all in archaeology.

Time Team' is by definition very static. Once you're in that field and you've dug your trenches, that's it.

Archaeology can be overlooked as a discipline, I think, but it's incredibly important to have this other way of approaching the past - not just through historical documents, but through actual physical remains - objects, buildings and the layout of our towns.

There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

History is as much an art as a science.