Those events coincided with an independent change in modern perceptions of the classical world in which the Greeks rapidly overtook the Romans in general esteem and in their standing as founders of European civilization, and admiration for Greek architecture became almost as widespread as that for Greek sculpture. There was a clear progression from the activities of lord elgin, who disposed ruthlessly of architectural features that obstructed his access to sculptures, to those of C.R. Cockerell, who, only a decade later, lovingly recorded the architecture of Aigina and Bassai and for the most part left it in situ.

The philhellene movement, after the fulfillment of its primary mission of bringing about Greek independence, did not bear any immediate fruit for its main participants in terms of involvement in archaeological fieldwork in Greece. Instead, ironically, attention was next directed to the part of the ancient Greek world that remained under Ottoman rule—western Asia Minor. A similar policy of appropriating the choicer finds continued. British political influence, which in the new Greece had major rivals, was here supreme, and here, too, there were the footsteps of Leake and other travelers to point the way. In 1842, Sir Charles Fellows went to Xanthos under the aegis of a British naval expedition and removed the greater part of the Nereid Monument to London. But the dominant personality in this area was the curiously isolated figure of Sir Charles Newton (1816–1894), who spent much of the 1850s in Ionia as a British consul working at Knidos, Halicarnassus, and elsewhere. A notable result of his work was the acquisition of the frieze of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus for the british museum, as important a possession for the fourth century b.c. as the Elgin Marbles had been for the fifth. Though his activities at first sight remind one more of Elgin than of Stuart and Revett or Cockerell, Newton has some claim to be regarded as the true founder of British classical field archaeology in that he envisaged the potential for archaeology as an independent source of knowledge for the ancient world.

Hitherto, deference to the ancient written sources had been the guiding principal of all serious practitioners, in Britain and elsewhere. This had been the prime legacy of the founding father of the whole discipline a century earlier, the German art historian johan joachim winckelmann (Morris 1994). As the junior partner of traditional classics, classical archaeology had a fairly humble role but an apparently secure one, which even had incidental advantages (the participation of women, for example, was less strongly discouraged, and after 1900, an increasing number of women were able to take advantage of this fact). But Newton was more interested in evolutionary change in art than in illustrating texts or capturing a timeless ideal of perfection. The large collection of painted pottery that he donated to the British Museum was, for him, a potential independent source for the study of Greek society, religion, and everyday life rather than a reflection of the texts or an exemplification of classical beauty. Yet one senses that he died a disappointed man, probably in part because of the major change of direction in British archaeology of the Greek world that he had lived to see, and which was equally deprecated by much younger leading figures in the discipline.

The importance of the prehistoric discoveries by heinrich schliemann in the Aegean, from 1870 onward, was perhaps more favorably received among the educated public in Britain than in his native Germany or elsewhere, especially after they received the accolade of Prime Minister Gladstone’s patronage. When the British, slow and parsimonious to the last, eventually established a school of art and history in Athens in 1886 (years after the French, Germans, and Americans), the tide of prehistoric Aegean archaeology was already running fast, and it was to dominate the activity of the new school for the next century and more.

By 1896, the British had embarked on their first major prehistoric excavation at Phylakopi on the island of Melos, and in 1900, this work was rapidly eclipsed by the sensational discoveries of arthur evans (1850–1941) at knossos on Crete. Meanwhile, A.J.B. Wace (1879–1957) had already become active in the exploration of prehistoric Thessaly, and after World War I, he began the long-term excavation of a third great Bronze Age site, Mycenae. Other prehistoric sites of the first