the primacy of prehistory in British archaeological studies is a constant source of surprise to scholars from other European countries.

In keeping with this amateur tradition, it was the scholarly diplomat sir william hamilton (1731–1803) who became the first British figure of any note in Mediterranean studies. During a thirty-six-year tour of duty in Naples, he built up a large collection of Greek pottery from Italian sites and published information about it. Hamilton was notable among his contemporaries for his realization that much of his pottery must be of Greek, not Etruscan, manufacture. Though at first he still located the centers of production among the Greek colonies of southern Italy, a later consideration of the small quantities of material then known from greece itself led him to modify his view. Hamilton was also responsible for inaugurating the very high evaluation of Greek painted pottery, both figuratively, as a field of study, and literally, in terms of the market value of actual specimens; both have lasted to our own times. By contrast, his overriding aim, to use his collection to influence contemporary design, was to prove less durable.

In the period before the Greek War of Independence (1821–1830), and at times even after it, travel in Greece outside of Athens was hazardous. It is true that in 1751 the society of dilettanti had sent the architects James Stuart and Nicholas Revett to Athens to record the standing remains of ancient architecture. This mission was executed to a very high standard of precision and accuracy and, in due time, was to bring into being a whole new branch of the discipline. But that was only in the following century, when their lead was followed by professionals of various nationalities, and the venture was for the time being an isolated one.

In general, Greece remained a country to be studied primarily through ancient texts, and it was only in italy that scholars could acquire firsthand experience of classical landscapes. Thus, Hamilton was also an early and frequent visitor to the excavations at pompeii and herculaneum, where an unmatched insight into Roman life was being gradually built up. But an independent tradition of British fieldwork in classical lands was slow to arrive. Its origins, and its almost total separation from the connoisseurship represented by Hamilton’s researches, may best be found in a very different and much more characteristically British tradition, that of the enterprising, educated traveler.

From as early as the 1670s, isolated British travelers had been writing accounts of their journeys through Greece and southern Italy, but such activity was raised to a higher plane by the arrival of William Martin Leake (1777–1860), a captain of artillery who resided in Greece and Asia Minor from 1799 to 1815 as an agent of the British government. Leake’s voluminous accounts of his travels are informed not only by his familiarity with the ancient texts but also by a practical eye for the date and nature of the visible remains, including inscriptions, and by an unusual sensitivity to the contemporary landscape. The claim advanced in his epitaph, “He rescued the early history of Greece from obscurity and the modern from misrepresentation,” is hardly an exaggeration.

Leake’s stay in Greece also witnessed the onset of two other movements, each of long-term importance for Greece, for Great Britain and other European powers, and specifically for archaeology. First, there was the arrival of a wave of representatives of the northern European elite who used the opportunity of the closing years of Ottoman rule in Greece to appropriate, for themselves or for their governments, a choice selection of sculptural and architectural antiquities before an independent Greece could call a halt to the practice. Second, there were the first harbingers of the philhellene movement, whose members strove to bring that independence about. The two most prominent members of these respective groups were, not surprisingly, also bitter enemies: Thomas Bruce, the seventh earl of Elgin, and Lord Byron. From the point of view of future British participation in Greek archaeology, it was the former group’s activity that turned out to be the more relevant because of the degree to which it raised public consciousness of what Greek art might have to offer. The main countries to benefit were Britain, which got the Parthenon marbles and the Bassai frieze, and Bavaria, which obtained the Aigina pediments.