Richard Leakey Quotes

'Shetland' is adapted from the novel 'Red Bones.' The book is based around an archaeological dig, and the mystery starts with the murder of the elderly woman who crofts the land where the dig is happening.

As an undergraduate, I had an opportunity to go on a number of archeological digs. So I had experience excavating, digging up remains of ancient Indian villages in the Midwest and in the Southwest.

The Thames could be thought of as England's longest archaeological site, and no fewer than 90,000 objects recovered from its foreshore are in the collection of the Museum of London, whose 30-year relationship with London mudlarks is both committed and highly regulated.

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

That ere long, now that curiosity has been so much excited on this subject, some human remains will be detected in the older alluvium of European valleys, I confidently expect.

I'd experienced the '40s and '50s by looking at my grandparents' old clothes, books, and magazines.

But when you see personal artifacts relating to - by genealogy at least - a living human being, it was just more impressive to me than just about anything I've ever read about slavery before.

I collect rocks from all over the world. I have a ring of stones that date to 3500 B.C. It's like a little Stonehenge.

I've never really seen archaeology as being any different from history. What I love are the stories of human beings that were around 1,000 years ago and how they lived - archaeology is another aspect to that.

Just as a fossil is 'petrified time,' so is an ancient artifact or text.

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.

I find the history of toys very interesting on an academic level - they're very much products of their time, just like paintings and furniture tell us about their time.

Religions are often state-protected nurseries of pseudoscience, although there's no reason why religions have to play that role. In a way, it's an artefact from times long gone.

There were details like clothing, hair styles and the fragile objects that hardly ever survive for the archaeologist-musical instruments, bows and arrows, and body ornaments depicted as they were worn... No amounts of stone and bone could yield the kinds of information that the paintings gave so freely

But then history does not only consist of documents.

Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more modern. It is written as if the specator should be thinking of the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience.

I love history. I'm very interested by it and I think it's great to have a movie that brings it alive in a way. It's sort of that romanticized version of it.

I'm a history person; I love history. But I am conditioned by the present.

If I were an antiquarian, I would have eyes only for old stuff, but I am a historian. Therefore, I love life.

Any given thing on the face of the earth could reveal the history of all things

I rummage around in artistic things from the past. If you don't understand the context, they wouldn't make any sense. I rummage around in conceptual ideas of the future, but if you don't know the source of the thinking, [it] wouldn't make any sense.

Will future ages believe that such stupid bigotry ever existed!

The entire drug phenomenon of the 1960s happened without the concept of shamanism to help it along.

I don't think you can say that feminism has made women critical of marriage because women have been critical of marriage for centuries.