No one, I suppose, would believe that an archaeologist is a man who knows where last year's lace valentines have gone, or that from the surface of rubbish heaps the thin and ghostly essence of things human keeps rising through the centuries until the plaintive murmur of dead men and women may take precedence at times over the living voice.

A man who has once looked with the archaeological eye will never see quite normally.

He will be wounded by what other men call trifles. It is possible to refine the sense of time until an old shoe in the bunch grass or a pile of 19th century bottles in an abandoned mining town tolls in one's head like a hall clock. This is a price one pays for learning to read time from surfaces other than the illustrated dial. It is the melancholy secret of the artifact, the humanly touched thing.

Source

Loren Eiseley. 1997 (originally 1971). The Night Country. University of Nebraska Press, p. 81

Suggested by Carl Steen

CryptoQuote #8 Solution

Portions of this fabulous quotation were used in the CryptoQuote published on October 28, 2009. Here's the solution:

A man who has once looked with the archaeological eye will never see quite normally. It is possible to refine the sense of time until an old shoe in the bunch grass or a pile of nineteenth century bottles in an abandoned mining town tolls in one's head like a hall clock. This is a price one pays for learning to read time from surfaces other than the illustrated dial.

Loren Eiseley.