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.
I would really love to go on an archaeological dig.
No tools have yet been met with in any of the gravels occurring at the higher levels of the valley of the Seine; but no importance can be attached to this negative fact, as so little search has yet been made for them.
The contents of the massive banks behind these successive revetments makes it quite clear that the material was derived from the incorporation of earlier occupation levels.
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.
Time Team' is by definition very static. Once you're in that field and you've dug your trenches, that's it.
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.
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.
I spend all day in museums. I even eat my lunch in the museum, and I take a nap for one hour there.
I studied archaeology.
In archaeology, context is the basis of many discoveries that are imputed to the deliberate workings of intelligence. If I find a rock chipped in such a way as to give it a sharp edge, and the discovery is made in a cave, I am seduced into ascribing this to tool use by distant, fetid and furry ancestors.
As anyone who has watched Time Team will know, the context is all in archaeology.
I am convinced that the stratigraphic method will in the future enable archaeology to throw far more light on the history of American culture than it has done in the past.
Well, we could tell them that we're here on an archeological expedition.
Not a single piece of material culture - not a single object - has been found at Giza that can be interpreted to come from a lost civilization.
If nothing were left of an extinct race but a single button, I would be able to infer, form the shape of that button, how these people dressed, built their houses, how they lived, what was their religion, their art, their mentality.
For me archaeology is not a source of illustrations for written texts, but an independent source of historical information, with no less value and importance, sometimes more importance, that the written sources.
