46 quotes found
"Art and the ability to comprehend it are more dependent on kinds of mental imagery and the ability to manipulate mental images than on intelligence."
"The contemporary Western emphasis on the supreme value of intelligence has tended to suppress certain forms of consciousness and to regard them as irrational, marginal, aberrant or even pathological and thereby to eliminate them from investigations of the deep past."
"According to this discovery, the oldest bows and bone arrows are now dated to just over 60 000 years old,”"
"These sites provide clues to the behaviour of early humans. The people who lived here were of the Homo sapiens species and there are signs that they lived as hunters as opposed to scavengers, as may have been the case with other human species such as Homo erectus and Homo ergaster."
"The structure of the human body, with its rotating hips and shoulders, enabled humans to use the throwing skill to great effect. It was only a matter of time before the early hurled objects began to take on the shapes of darts and arrows, followed at a later stage by the manufacture of arrowheads made from bone"
"The apparent aim of this paper is to reveal the contribution of archaeology to understanding the social relations of capitalism."
"The burden of this particular study of rural settlement in the Scottish Highlands is to show that archaeology helps to achieve a deeper understanding of the transition from clan ownership to individual ownership during the period of Improvement that heralded the dawn of the new commercial age in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries."
"If ever one wondered whether the life of a single man could illuminate a century, [this] brilliant biography … proves the point.”"
"In this area, people were able to choose from a long menu of foods including venison and the meat of other wild animals, berries, edible roots and corms, particularly of plants in the iris family, seafood including shellfish, fish, seabirds, stranded dolphins or whales, and much else. All these items have been identified in excavated food remains. It is, however, harder to know their relative importance."
"Bone tissue accumulates over many years, so this was a long-term dietary pattern. People buried at Matjes River Rock Shelter, on the other hand, ate much more mixed diets, with more terrestrial food or low trophic level [low on the food chain] marine foods, such as shellfish."
"What's surprising about it is the degree of specialisation in local resources, from which we can infer that these people were living within relatively small areas, rather than trekking regularly across large areas of landscape. This is unexpected, given the very mobile lifestyle of most recent southern African hunter-gatherers."
"There is an extensive literature on the use of ethnography in archaeology and the dangers of simplistic assumptions that past societies were necessarily like recent ones."
"It is often very hard to recognize when similar elements were deployed in different social and cultural systems in the past, as I argue is the case here."
"It is true that many burials were isolated interments in scattered localities, but other caves also contained large numbers of graves--Whitchers Cave, for example. Unfortunately, this was excavated early in the twentieth century, and most of the remains recovered have been lost. We are interested in what the placement of graves meant to the survivors, and how this fitted in with peoples' concepts of the landscape."
"Gender roles changed with environmental shifts, and certain tasks such as big-game hunting disappeared as a result. In other cases, gender roles were revised because of social pressures imposed on specific communities."
"Gender roles can be identified in some archaeological sites in parts of Africa, and these roles sometimes appear to have altered through time."
"In some parts of Africa such as Mali, men and women are buried with the artifacts they owned in life, while in Ethiopia, stelae mark the gender of the deceased. Elsewhere, as in the Stone Age of southern Africa, gender-undifferentiated grave goods are placed with men, women, and children, suggesting a genderless ancestral world."
"Some aspects of initiation rites may be detected archaeologically through skeletal alterations, rock art motifs, and props such as scarified dolls."
"The initiations are largely designed to instruct initiates about behavior appropriate for men and women of reproductive age belonging to a specific community"
"Sub-Saharan African rites of passage into adulthood are sometimes marked by gender-specific physical mutilations such as circumcision, dental modification or scarification, together with other forms of symbolic marking that invariably adopt a binary gender system as the norm."
"I have dedicated my life to African archaeology because the deep past in Africa is everyone’s heritage and it must be protected."
"We have incredible archaeological sites in this country and we frequently recover new and exciting data."
"The best way to preserve our heritage for future generations is to teach young people about it and involve them in the process of acquiring such knowledge for themselves"
"It is a personal honour to be elected to the British Academy, but I particularly hope that my appointment will contribute towards raising the international profile of Wits University."
"We all love a good fictional superhero, but real scientists, real people, have just as amazing powers!"
"Just take that first leap of faith and trust the process! All whilst working hard and intentionally at achieving the goal."
"Trust the process, and if you don’t like it or it’s not working for you, change it. Be the change instead of waiting for change."
"For as long as there's people around asking questions, exploration isn't dead. Once we accept that, new and exciting things will come to light that will add to the story of our deep human journey."
"Be true to yourself. The dreams that you had as a child were real and pure. With sheer determination, those dreams can come true."
"We were really put in very extreme situations, crawling through very tight tunnels, i've had my butt stuck, I've had my head stuck and it's a challenge not to panic -- but also, you learn a lot about yourself and inner strength in those conditions."
"I am fortunate to be able to work within this fossil-rich reserve. It’s been fun to share my excitement with the women who will become South Africa’s ambassadors, taking part of the story of human origins with them and raising critical interest in our globally shared heritage."
"Imposter syndrome. My insecurities regarding not being good enough at times lead to self-sabotage."
"You can do anything if you want to do it and shouldn’t be restricted by what you have learned at school."
"I really wanted to know about the archaeology of South Africa and although Professor Wintle and I came from different backgrounds, we learned from each other. She took me through the steps of the science behind luminescence dating. I was meticulous and hard-working and never gave up and realised I had innate ability to do science."
"I consider myself to be an "Environmentalist for Nuclear Science--despite a lot of concerns and criticism because many benefits for mankind arise from the use of nuclear applications, specifically in health, food, agriculture and environmental protection."
"I would altogether talk to thee, while my thinking."
"Animals are not only good to eat but also good to think."
"Category:Women archaeologists"
"Category:People from KwaZulu-Natal"
"Category:1932 births"
"Category:2003 deaths"
"Theory is part of the romance of archaeology and is vital if we want to breathe some life into the snippets of information drawn from stone and other artefacts."
"The reason why much of Stone Age history has remained a secret for so long is not that it may not be told or that it has not been told in other books, but rather that it has to be individually discovered. Because we are remote from the past, we have to find it and immerse ourselves in it, if we wish to understand it and unlock its secrets. Pursuing the past is rewarding, and we hope it is a challenge more will follow."
"The faunal sample from Kadzi, an Early Iron Age site in the Zambezi Valley, is the first substantial sample for that period and region in Zimbabwe."
"The site appears to have been a permanent or semipermanent settlement. The sample consists mainly of bovid remains, dominated by buffalo as a single species, suggesting special hunting skills."
"The presence of some domestic animals proves that these animals were available to the inhabitants of the site. Their status in the community is, however, uncertain. Possible explanations for the small number of cattle fragments could be the result of paucity of livestock for environmental or other reasons, or may reflect differential disposal of cattle bones as part of ritual expression."