I excavate history. I look at lives buried under too much silence. Periods of time, like slavery, have to be revisited, reimagined, so we can move through them.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
History devours, but at times it resurrects. Some lives must wait for history to catch up.
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?
Most of us, I think, are conscious of history swirling around outside the door, but when we're in the house, we're usually not dealing with history. We're not thinking about history.
In the years that I worked in museums, first as a summer student and eventually as a curator, one of the primary lessons I learned was this: History is shaped by the people who seek to preserve it. We, of the present, decide what to keep, what to put on display, what to put into storage, and what to discard.
We're all struggling to get out of the past. We see something that reminds us of something, and then we bring our baggage into the present. Then we project it onto people constantly.
The tasks of paleontologists and classical historians and archaeologists are remarkably similar - to excavate, decipher and bring to life the tantalizing remnants of a time we will never see.
I think archaeologists are stuck, and we are losing our past at a very rapid rate. Tens of thousands of sites will be lost, and we've only unveiled a tiny percent of the past.
I do miss the excitement of seeing history up close, of having intimate knowledge, through direct experience, of what happens when people and governments clash, but I do not miss the danger or the constant displacement.
So often, we don't realize that the very moments in which we live become our history, our story.
People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.
No opposing quotes found.