Quotations

Quotations

Pithy quotations about local archaeology are welcome here - contibutions to the webmaster@archaeopedia.com.

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About.com's archaeologist quotations is worth a visit here.

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It was decided therefore to use the plough as a quicker method of exploring the area. Burial 19 at point 32 .... was soon located from the presence of some mandible fragments in the furrow, and burial 20 at point 33 ... from some cranium fragments and a tooth. Roger Duff 1950 The Moa-Hunter Period of Maori Culture, page 60. We know more about the Classic Maori than we shall know about any other phase of prehistoric New Zealand culture, because with the arrival of literate Europeans, prehistory was "caught alive". Jack Golson 1959 Culture change in Prehistoric New Zealand. in Anthropology in the South Seas. Ed. Freeman, J. D. & Geddes, W. R. Thomas Avery & Sons Ltd., New Plymouth, page 47. Mr. Hocken, the well-known archaeologist from Dunedin, has just completed a visit to North Auckland in connection with the New Zealand career of the Rev. Samuel Marsden, who was responsible for the introduction of the missionaries to this colony in 1814. Dr. Hocken has obtained a quantity of valuable historical matter concerning early missionary effort in New Zealand, and intends to publish a book on the subject. Evening Post, 7 March 1905. See at Papers Past (The earliest use of "archaeologist" on Papers Past, or anywhere describing a New Zealand resident?) Of their long residence the Maoris have left many traces behind them. The remains "of their whares may be seen everywhere and the writer of these lines spent a few hours very pleasantly fossicking about in search of greenstone and other relics. He was pretty successful in his research, having found several specimens of axes, adzes, and so on. These implements appear to have been dropped in the sand, and- so lost the sand which covered them being afterwards blown away by the wind. .............. It thus appears that New Zealand has passed at once from the stone age of the archaeologist to the iron age, without passing through, the intermediate or bronze period. "A Trip on the Coast" by "Pakeha" Otago Witness, Issue 655, 18 June 1864, Page 8 Papers Past (Ed: The three ages division of archaeology publication in English in Charles Lyell's The Antiquity of Man, 1863, may well be the source of this. Still the writer identified himself as a fossicker rather than an archaeologist.) I feel sure that much useful data would be obtained by digging in some of the old historical pa sites and carrying out work like Skinner has done in the south with the moa hunter people. Peter Buck 1933, Na To Hoa Aroha From your Dear Friend. Ngata / Buck Correspondence, edited M P K Sorrenson, Vol 3 1932-50. Auckland University Press 1988, page 66.