Eyewitness to Discovery: First-Person Accounts of More than Fifty of the World's Greatest Archaeological Discoveries, edited by Brian M. Fagan, Oxford University Press, 1996

"Archaeology is a priceless, dispassionate eye into the past for the artifacts of ancient times provide a telling record of human behavior, of the ways in which different members of a society negotiated with one another and coped with prevailing conditions. In the final analysis, the human past is not just a record of rulers and statesmen going about their business... It is a record of continual, ever changing interactions between people, rich and poor, important and humble… The challenge for the archaeologist is to reconstruct and understand the past using only the durable and surviving remains of ancient behavior."