The Egyptian tomb was the outcome of the Mesopotamian influence and followed from the religious crisis the country had undergone.
There are huge pluses in Scottish archaeology that you simply don't get elsewhere. Partly that's to do with the tragedy of the clearances, and that so much of the landscape has been owned by so few people that didn't want it messed around with.
I think ceramics are so amazing because they're incredibly educational - you can buy something made in the 14th century, and it looks like it was made yesterday. There's something to be learned there, and ceramics can tell you the history of the time because they're functional vessels, ultimately.
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.
Since graveyards are often built over older burial grounds, I assume Dolores Park was probably an Indian, (an Ohlone) graveyard before that. I think the fact that it has so many layers underneath the contemporary one intrigues me.
What would the world say if the Globe, now that it has at last been found, is not excavated?
In the world of the Middle East at the moment, the debates are shrill. But ... the wisest voice of all of them may well be the voice of this mute thing, the Cyrus cylinder.
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
Monuments and archaeological pieces serve as testimonies of man's greatness and establish a dialogue between civilizations showing the extent to which human beings are linked.
Poetry is a fossil rock-print of a fin and a wing, with an illegible oath between.
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.
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.
