"It is in the corners of human space that the remnants of future knowledge emerge. The lost trinkets of history, left in shadows, in corners become the resounding symbols of the past for future generations. This position varies widely of course, dependant on different kinds of archaeology, but the position in space of objects determines their social and cultural value. This value, once transmogrified through time and 3dimensional space (the strata of layers) becomes of a different significance. The digging out, the re-finding of objects lets the forgotten corner becomes the prized remnant, artefact of history."

Gaston Bachelard – The Poetics of Space

"History must be detached from the image that satisfied it for so long, and through which it found its anthropological justification: that of an age old collective consciousness that made use of material documents to refresh its memory; history is the work expended on material documentation (books, texts, accounts, registers, acts, buildings, institutions, laws, techniques, objects, customs etc.) that exists, in every time and place, in every society, either in a spontaneous or in a consciously organised form. The document is not the fortunate tool of history that is primarily and fundamentally memory; history is one way in which a society recognises and develops a mass of documentation with which it is inextricably linked."

Foucault – The Archaeology of Knowledge