Brendan Foley Quotations

The thing that makes this archeology and not treasure-hunting or salvage is the scientific approach, which includes precision navigation and mapping.

The thing that makes artifacts important is their spatial relationships to each other. If you don't record those spatial relationships carefully, then you're not doing archeology. The minute you remove an artifact from a site and put it somewhere else, then you've lost information. The precision mapping done by the navigation system and the sub-profiler makes what we do archeological science.

Our technologies allows us to learn about the past in ways that we couldn't achieve otherwise. We're not looking for footnotes any more. We're looking to write new chapters, and are convinced that in 10 to 15 years using these methods, we will have changed history.

This is real research - slow, serious, scientifically rigorous and painstaking work. It will go in strange directions, produce ambiguous results along the way, and raise a lot of new questions, but we're convinced that in 10 to 15 years, we will change history.

Hopefully when it counts on Thursday we'll win.