Uncovering the Past Quotes

There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.

The book begins and ends with the visits to give the impression of a tunnel into their ancestors and family history. I believe in going backwards into the past - I felt I was digging a tunnel back to the past.

To excavate a pyramid is the dream of every archaeologist.

Many Americans have a traitor lurking somewhere in their family tree.

The most exciting part of what I do is understanding the scale of what we don't know. There are just countless archaeological sites all over the world, and one of the most important and best ways of finding them is using digital technology.

I just gravitate to movies where the mystery is the character himself. Any time you see a trailer of something where somebody is questioning 'Who am I?' I'm hooked.

No one will ever know the complete truth.

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 truth brings the past into the present and prepares us for the future. That's what truth does

I like finding things that are on the fringes and sort of half-forgotten, and to remind us of those things.

There are no secrets that time does not reveal.

To me, reading through old letters and journals is like treasure hunting. Somewhere in those faded, handwritten lines there is a story that has been packed away in a dusty old box for years.

We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.

If I don't tell it all now, the story in the history books will always be imperfect and that would be wrong.

I can't see much purpose in archaeology unless you can find out the narrative about that place, or even realise that nobody actually knows what the narrative was.

I see people as haunted by the selves they don't know... I don't have children, but I have nieces and nephews, and one thing I notice is how fascinated they are by stories of their lives before they can remember.

History is a certain way, but you just change the point of view a little bit, and you discover a whole new side of it.

What would the world say if the Globe, now that it has at last been found, is not excavated?

Old reference books are like tree rings. Without them, there'd be no way to know what a tree had lived through.

You know when you take the paint off an old canvas and you discover that something's been painted underneath it? That's what I feel like - that part of the old is coming through the new.

In hunting ideas for books, I look for stories about long-past events that once commanded the world's attention but that, for one reason or another, faded from contemporary awareness.

Archaeology is the peeping Tom of the sciences. It is the sandbox of men who care not where they are going; they merely want to know where everyone else has been.

I love the wry motto of the Paleontological Society, meant both literally and figuratively, for hammers are the main tool of our trade: Frango ut patefaciam - I break in order to reveal.

We take it for granted sometimes that certain parts of our history are told, and we take it for granted that we know all that stuff, and we move forward along on that basis, but there are also massive gaps, and we have to try to address them.

Real Super 8 is creepy. If you went into your grandmother's attic and found her Super 8 films and watched them, I don't care what was on them, there would be something a little creepy feeling about it.