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Author: Marilyn Johnson
Quotes of Author: Marilyn Johnson

Marilyn Johnson _ Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists
Place is not the background of archaeology-it's the point. As any archaeologist will tell you, context is everything.
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Marilyn Johnson _ Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists
The convention that there were two sides to every story eliminated the third and fourth and fifth sides. Even dividing the past two and a half million years into the "Neolithic" {the new stone age} and the "Paleolithic" {the old stone age} was reductionist. "Write this down," he said. "Dichotomies are for idiots.
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Marilyn Johnson _ Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists
One of the advantages of living in the Ice Age would be that there are not very many people around. You're constantly moving, and you have to live by your wits. You can't just have fifteen different kinds of tools, you can't carry them. And no villages-no village idiots. Imagine a world free of idiots!" Idiots, he liked to point out, "don't survive in environments with lions.
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Marilyn Johnson _ Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists
bone grease with dried meat and berries to make pemmican, the energy bars of a thousand years ago, and with a pouch of pemmican, the Native Americans were good to travel far and wide. {If you can't pack portable food, you spend most of your time hunting and foraging}.
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Marilyn Johnson _ Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists
Homo sapiens who lived in caves put trash in front and slept in the back; not so in the caves occupied by Homo heidelbergensis. Those humans, probably the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens and neanderthalensis, lived like frat boys 700,000 to 300,000 years ago, "flinging shit everywhere"-and the idea of slovenly boy and girl ancestors fascinated me. "Big heavy stone tools . . . probably solved things with brute force. Commandos without too much thought," Shea riffed. "If you were going to cast Jersey Shore, you'd go with heidelbergensis.
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Marilyn Johnson _ This Book Is Overdue!: How
Whole chapters of contemporary history are disappearing into the ether as e-mails get trashed and webpages are taken down and people die without sharing their passwords.
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Marilyn Johnson _ This Book Is Overdue!: How
I became interested in librarians while researching my first book, about obituaries. With the exception of a few showy eccentrics, like the former soldier in Hitler's army who had a sex change and took up professional whistling, the most engaging obit subjects were librarians. An obituary of a librarian could be about anything under the sun, a woman with a phenomenal memory, who recalled the books her aging patrons read as children-and was also, incidentally, the best sailor on her stretch of the Maine coast-or a man obsessed with maps, who helped automate the Library of Congress's map catalog and paved the way for wonders like Google Maps.
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Marilyn Johnson _ This Book Is Overdue!: How
I regretted my human form briefly; it would be so much easier to drag and rope information into the brain as neatly as one dragged and dropped information on the computer. Perhaps I was suffering from a touch of information sickness? If I could weed out my thoughts...There was one reliable cure I've found, a bit of the hair of the dog--the release in reading. Not a manual: something with a narrative, a chute built by a writer and waxed until the reader fell into it and skittered right to the end without stopping. The relief of being in someone else's hands. Yes, exactly: I needed to be under a spell....it didn't matter who I was, or what I did, or where I paid taxes, or how long I stayed. I'm sure it didn't matter if the book had RFID tags or a checkout card with a ladder of scrawled names, though tags were neat. I knew the librarians would help me figure out anything I needed to know later--I was under the librarians' protection. Civil servants and servants of civility, they had my back. They would be whatever they needed to be that day: information professionals, teachers, police, community organizers, computer technicians, historians, confidantes, clerks, social workers, storytellers, or in this case, guardians of my peace.They were the authors of this opportunity--diversion from the economy and distraction from snow, protectors of the bubble of concentration I'd found in the maddening world. And I knew they wouldn't disturb me until closing time.
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Marilyn Johnson _ This Book Is Overdue!: How
A library is a place to go for a reality check, a bracing dose of literature, or a "true reflection of our history," whether it's a brick-and-mortar building constructed a century ago or a fanciful arrangement of computer codes. The librarian is the organizer, the animating spirit behind it, and the navigator. Her job is to create order out of the confusion of the past, even as she enables us to blast into the future.
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Marilyn Johnson _ Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists
Some of these tools were ingenious, including sets of playing cards for Iraq, Egypt, and Afghanistan-regular fifty-two-card decks, but with images and information about archaeological practices, famous cultural sites, and notable artifacts; the reverse sides could be pieced together to form a map of the most iconic site for each country.
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Marilyn Johnson _ This Book Is Overdue!: How
Writers seldom just stop writing. We're like serial killers in that way. You have to stop us, because we cannot stop ourselves.
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Marilyn Johnson _ Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists
One graduate student told me, "When the Apocalypse comes, you want to know an archaeologist, because we know how to make fire, catch food, and create hill forts," and I promptly added her to my address book. Knows how to make hill forts-who can say when that will come in handy?
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