Quotes by Archaeologists - Page 2

Tedious as it may appear to some to dwell on the discovery of odds and ends that have, no doubt, been thrown away by the owner as rubbish ... yet it is by the study of such trivial details that Archaeology is mainly dependent for determining the date of earthworks. ... Next to coins fragments of pottery afford the most reliable of all evidence ...
Augustus Pitt Rivers
Thousands of years before Christianity, secret cults arose which worshipped the sacred mushroom—the Amanita Muscaria—which, for various reasons (including its shape and power as a drug) came to be regarded as a symbol of God on earth.When the secrets of the cult had to be written down, it was done in the form of codes hidden in folk tales.This is the basic origin of the stories in the New Testament. They are a literary device to spread the rites and rules of mushroom worship to the faithful.
John Marco Allegro
The greatest advantage of all is that when people think you're a witch, you can eat an entire serving of squash all by yourself.
Kathleen O'Neal Gear
To excavate is to open a book written in the language that the centuries have spoken into the earth.
Spyridon Marinatos
The sky [above Tehran] was like a star-eaten black blanket, and so far as I could read them its constellations were unfamiliar. Lawrence speaks somewhere of drawing 'strength from the depths of the universe'; Malcolm Lowry speaks about the deadness of the stars except when he looked at them with a particular girl; I had neither feeling. The founder of the Jesuits used to spend many hours under the stars; it is hard to be certain whether his first stirrings of scientific speculation or pre-scientific wonder about space and the stars in their own nature were some element in his affinity with starlight, or whether for him they were only a point of departure, but in this matter I think I am about fifty years more modern than Saint Ignatius; stars mean to me roughly what they meant to Donne's generation, a bright religious sand imposing the sense of an intrusion into human language, and arousing a certain personal thirst to be specific.
Peter Levi
Every kind of language is... specialized form of bodily gesture, and in this sense it may be said that the dance is the mother of all languages... an original language of total bodily gesture.This "original" language of total bodily gesture is thus the one and only real language, which everybody who is in any way expressing himself is using all the time. What we call speech and the other kinds of language are only parts of it which have undergone specialized development.
R.G. Collingwood
If I could talk it like Dahoum, you would never be tired of listening to me.
T.E. Lawrence
A shaman’s activities as a sorcerer, or his own conscious act of entry into the supernatural world, were a kind of “killing”.
James David Lewis-Williams
Rock art sites were symbolic vaginas, and entry into the wall of a rock art site was thus akin to intercourse.
James David Lewis-Williams
For the makers, the paintings and engravings were visions, not representations of visions.
James David Lewis-Williams
In Lascaux and other sites, hoofs are depicted to show their underside, or hoofprint.
James David Lewis-Williams
Under certain social circumstances, which may have varied from time to time and place to place, certain people (shamans) saw a relationship between the small, three-dimensional, projected mental images that they experienced at the far end of the intensified spectrum and fragments of animals that lay around their hearths.
James David Lewis-Williams
The portable animal statuettes were therefore far more than decorative trinkets: they were reified three-dimensional spirit animals with all their prophylactic and other powers.
James David Lewis-Williams
I now argue that entry into Upper Palaeolithic caves was probably seen as virtually indistinguishable from entry into the mental vortex that leads to the experiences and hallucinations of deep trance.
James David Lewis-Williams
Certainly, the sensory deprivation afforded by the remote, silent and totally dark chambers, such as the Diverticule of the Felines in Lascaux and the Horse’s Tail in Altamira, induces altered states of consciousness.
James David Lewis-Williams
To understand the ‘wounded men’ of Upper Palaeolithic art, I now consider somatic hallucinations; these include attenuation of the body and limbs, polymelia (having extra limbs or digits), and, the one on which I focus, pricking and stabbing sensations.
James David Lewis-Williams
Shamans submit to death in order to serve their communities.
James David Lewis-Williams
The Upper Palaeolithic figures known as ‘wounded men’ occur at Cougnac and Pech Merle, two sites in the Quercy district of France.
James David Lewis-Williams
The ‘wounded men’ may, I argue, represent a form of shamanistic suffering, ‘death’ and initiation that was closely associated with somatic hallucinati
James David Lewis-Williams
Sexual arousal and penal erections are associated with both altered states of consciousness and sleep.
James David Lewis-Williams
It is the task of San shamans to activate their supernatural potency, to cause it to ‘boil’ up their spines until it explodes in their heads and takes them off to the spirit realms – that is, they enter a state of trance at the far end of the intensified trajectory.
James David Lewis-Williams
According to Martindale’s view, as we drift into sleep we pass through: – waking, problem-oriented thought, – realistic fantasy, – autistic fantasy, – reverie, – hypnagogic (falling asleep) states, and – dreaming.
James David Lewis-Williams
In altered states of consciousness, the nervous system itself becomes a ‘sixth sense’ that produces a variety of images including entoptic phenomena.
James David Lewis-Williams
The behaviour of the human nervous system in certain altered states creates the illusion of dissociation from one’s body (less commonly understood in hunting and gathering shamanistic societies as possession by spirits).
James David Lewis-Williams
San religion is built around belief in a tiered universe. As do other shamanistic peoples throughout the world, the San believe in a realm above and another below the surface of the world on which they live.
James David Lewis-Williams
There were at least four contexts in which San shamans acquired insights into the spiritual world: – the trance dance, – special curing rituals, – viewing rock art, and – dreams.
James David Lewis-Williams
The principal aim of a vision quest is to ‘see’ a spirit animal that will become the quester’s animal-helper and source of his power.
James David Lewis-Williams
Entering a cave” or rock was a metaphor for a shaman’s altered state; therefore, caves (and rocks more generally) were considered entrances or portals to the supernatural world.
James David Lewis-Williams
The first two-dimensional images were thus not two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional things in the material world, as researchers have always assumed. Rather, they were ‘fixed’ mental images.
James David Lewis-Williams
Shamanism is not simply a component of society: on the contrary, shamanism, together with its tiered cosmos, can be said to be the overall framework of society.
James David Lewis-Williams
Perhaps the most striking feature of the west European Upper Palaeolithic, one on which many writers comment, is a sharp increase in the rate of change. Compared with the preceding Middle Palaeolithic, a great deal happened in a comparatively short time.
James David Lewis-Williams
The notion that an image is a scale model of something else (say, a horse) requires a different set of mental events and conventions from those that perceive the social symbolism of red marks on someone’s chest.
James David Lewis-Williams
Around 30,000 years ago, in the Aurignacian, at the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic, someone or some group in the Eyzies region invented drawing, the representation in two dimensions on the flat of the stone of what appeared in the environment in three dimensions.
James David Lewis-Williams
Consciousness has evolved biologically and can therefore be explained biologically.
James David Lewis-Williams
The cerebral cortex, the outer ‘skin’ of the brain, contains as many as ten billion neurons. This complexity is daunting. Yet it is out of complex interactions between the billions of neurons that consciousness arises.
James David Lewis-Williams
Primary consciousness is a state of being aware of things in the world – of having mental images in the present.But it is not accompanied by any sense of a person with a past and future…
James David Lewis-Williams
Primary consciousness is a kind of ‘remembered present’…
James David Lewis-Williams
I believe it is reasonable to assume that higher-order consciousness developed neurologically in Africa before the second wave of emigration to the Middle East and Europe.
James David Lewis-Williams
Improved memory made possible the long-term recollection of dreams and visions and the construction of those recollections into a spirit world.
James David Lewis-Williams
Some researchers believe that dreaming is what happens when sensory input to the brain is greatly diminished: the brain then ‘freewheels’, synapses firing more or less at random, and the brain tries to make sense of the resultant stream of images.
James David Lewis-Williams
Once human beings had developed higher-order consciousness, they had the ability to see mental images projected onto surfaces and to experience afterimages.
James David Lewis-Williams
In southern Africa, a great many figures are ithyphallic. This feature has generally – and rather vaguely – been taken to refer to ‘masculinity’, but the painted contexts of the figures seems to confirm that, as in North America, sexual arousal was a metaphor for altered states of consciousness.
James David Lewis-Williams
Many men would take the death-sentence without a whimper, to escape the life-sentence which fate carries in her other hand.
T.E. Lawrence
After a duration of a thousand years, the power of astrology broke down when, with Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, the progress of astronomy overthrew the false hypothesis upon which the entire structure rested, namely the geocentric system of the universe. The fact that the earth revolves in space intervened to upset the complicated play of planetary influences, and the silent stars, related to the unfathomable depths of the sky, no longer made their prophetic voices audible to mankind. Celestial mechanics and spectrum analysis finally robbed them of their mysterious prestige.
Franz Cumont
A series of failures may culminate in the best possible result.
Gisela Richter
Judas said, "Master, as you have listened to all of them, now also listen to me. For I have seen a great vision." And when Jesus heard this, he laughed and said to him, "You thirteenth daimon, why do you try so hard? But speak up, and I shall bear with you.
Rodolphe Kasser
Master, take me in along with these people." Jesus answered and said, "Your star has led you astray, Judas.
Rodolphe Kasser
Whether or not the fame of Gilgamesh of Uruk had reached the Aegean – and the idea is attractive – there can be no doubt that it was as great as that of any other hero. In time his name became so much a household word that jokes and forgeries were fathered onto it, as in a popular fraud that survives on eighth-century B.C. tablets which perhaps themselves copy an older text. This is a letter supposed to be written by Gilgamesh to some other king, with commands that he should send improbable quantities of livestock and metals, along with gold and precious stones for an amulet for Enkidu, which would weigh no less that thirty pounds. The joke must have been well received, for it survives in four copies, all from Sultantepe.
N.K. Sandars
The two centrepieces of social intelligence are the possession of extensive social knowledge about other individuals, in terms of knowing who allies and friends are, and the ability to infer the mental states of those individuals.
Steven Mithen
It is clear from both documentary and archaeological sources that conspicuous display and consumption of wealth was fundamental for an elite male to maintain power and position in society.
Sally Crawford
Society can be a bitch.""And is by no means always right. Society can't know you like you know yourself. So don't let society be the judge of your actions. Only you can judge you.
G.B. Gordon
Better to have a messy home and happy children than a perfect yard and unhappy children
Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg
Objectives are only words written on paper without passion and desire
W. T. Albright
The most unknown, unused and unrecognised tool of the human mind, is the recognition that attitude is always a choice.
Mark Horton
But you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man who bears me. Already your horn has been raised, and your wrath has been kindled, and your star has passed by, and your heart has become strong." [--Jesus to Judas]
Rodolphe Kasser
My roses are my jewels, the sun and moon my clocks, fruit and water my food and drink.
Hester Lucy Stanhope
To gain an understanding of the mind leads on to an appreciation of what it means to be human.
Steven Mithen
From the literary point of view, the Koran has little merit. Declamation, repetition, puerility, a lack of logic and coherence strike the unprepared reader at every turn. It is humiliating to the human intellect to think that this mediocre literature has been the subject of innumerable commentaries, and that millions of men are still wasting time in absorbing it." (Orpheus, Salmon Reinach, 1932. See page 175 of the book here)
Salomon Reinach
A constant factor in human history is the need to protect oneself. Another factor is the urge to attack someone else.
Stan Beckensall
We were fond together because of the sweep of open places, the taste of wide winds, the sunlight, and the hopes in which we worked. The morning freshness of the world-to-be intoxicated us. We were wrought up with ideas inexpressible and vaporous, but to be fought for. We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves: yet when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to remake in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep, and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace.
T.E. Lawrence