Archaeology

Archaeology is the study of human cultures through the recovery, documentation and analysis of material remains and environmental data, including architecture, artifacts, biofacts, human remains, and landscapes.

Sourced

• Archaeology is destruction.
  • Mortimer Wheeler Archaeology From the Earth (1954)

• Archaeology is archaeology is archaeology
  • David Clarke "Analytical Archaeology" (1968)

• History is too serious to be left to historians.
  • Ian Macleod, The Observer (July 16, 1961)

• He that diggeth a pit, shall fall into it.
  • King James Bible Proverbs 26:27,

• Archaeology is the nearest history comes to shopping.
  • Alan Bennett (2004) The History Boys

Verse

Dug from the tomb of taste-refining time,

Each form is exquisite, each block sublime.

Or good, or bad,—disfigur’d, or deprav’d,—

All art, is at its resurrection sav’d;

All crown’d with glory in the critic’s heav’n,

Each merit magnified, each fault forgiven.

Martin Archer Shee (1805) Rhymes on Art, or the Remonstrance of a Painter Part 2

Unsourced

• My perspective is a broad one. For me, archaeologists do not discover the past; they work on what remains. Archaeology is about our relationships with what is left of the past. And more - archaeology is the discipline of things - the history of design, how people get on with the material world, materiality itself.
  • Michael Shanks (Michael Shanks home page)