Introduction

More than any other branch of archaeology, classical archaeology has a history. It is not simply that people have been concerned with the material culture of Greek and Roman antiquity for a very long time now, and that attempts to put the remains of Greek and Roman sculpture and architecture into some sort of order go back to the 18th century. It is also that what scholars do with that material culture today is in dialogue not just with the Greek and Roman past but with the history of its own scholarship.

It is for this reason that this volume opens with two discussions of the nature and tradition of classical archaeology that have a strongly historical focus. Understanding what questions classical archaeologists have asked, why they have asked these questions, and why some questions have raised and continue to raise particular scholarly sensitivities depends upon understanding the history of the discipline.

Part of the peculiar position of classical archaeology arises from the way in which it is both a branch of archaeology and a branch of Classics. Interest in the material culture of Greek and Roman antiquity has arisen not simply through the intrinsic interest of the material but through interest in the relationship between the material world and the world of classical texts. At the same time, the wealth of classical texts offers classical archaeologists a resource not available to prehistoric archaeology. Yet the way in which the questions asked by classical archaeologists, and the sites which they investigate, have been determined by classical texts has often been seen as a weakness, rather than a strength. Archaeologists working in prehistory have frequently found themselves impatient with what they see as the reduction of material culture to providing illustration to texts. They have been impatient too with

Classical archaeology’s tendency to pay attention to certain classes of artifact (above all to “works of art”) and to ignore other classes of artifact. For them, classical archaeology has too often seemed to be a treasure hunt where the clues are provided entirely by texts, in the tradition of Schliemann digging at Troy with Homer in hand.

Our two discussions of the nature of the subject are drawn from scholars who come from the opposite ends of classical archaeology. One is a specialist in Greek and the other a specialist in Roman archaeology. Yet more importantly in this context, one is a scholar whose primary training was in Classics, whose first publication was an artifact study (of arms and armor), and whose university positions were always associated with departments of Classics. The other is a scholar whose training was in archaeology and who until recently had held positions entirely in archaeology departments. The very different perspectives offered fTom these different backgrounds offer a comprehensive foundation for understanding the classical archaeology to which they and the rest of this volume serve as a guide.