each in their time to be considered as being among the outstanding exponents of Greek art history. Humfry Payne (1902–1936), despite his early death, was another.

The archaeology of Italy and of the Roman Empire in general had followed an almost entirely separate course, in British though hardly in Continental scholarship, and was practiced not merely by different individuals but by quite different kinds of archaeologists. In Britain, the study of Roman art languished while the investigation of remains in the field held sway. We may begin with Roman Britain itself. From the time of william camden’s survey of Hadrian’s Wall in 1599, it was taken for granted that Roman-British remains lay within the purview of the antiquaries who studied the prehistory of Britain. Of all the famous British prehistorians, from pioneers like william stukeley to moderns like mortimer wheeler, some involvement with Roman-British archaeology was a common feature, and a standing army of gifted amateurs provided specialization in their own localities. The artistic quality of the finds offered few attractions for the aesthetic approach, and the surviving documentary sources were too thin to provide much opening for textual learning. A separate tradition had grown up, and a measure of its achievement is that, to this day, Britannia remains from most points of view the most thoroughly studied province of the Roman Empire.

In Rome itself, the establishment of a British school of archaeology occurred only in 1901 (seventy-two years after the opening of a corresponding German-based institution). From the start, a new note was detectable, businesslike and unfussy, and it can be seen in the inaugural numbers of the respective periodicals of the two schools. Ironically, it was in Rome that formal provision was to be made for practicing artists. Whereas the launch of the Athens school celebrated the participation of royalty, the church, and the arts, the Rome Papers begin with a fifteen-line note from the chairman, stating only, “The title of this volume sufficiently indicates its character.”

The dominant personality of the early years was Thomas Ashby (1874–1931), the school’s director for nearly twenty years and in whose work we see the reemergence of another long-established British tradition, topographical survey. The characteristics of that tradition were hardihood and rapid movement, for the aim was to traverse a whole region, preferably on foot, registering all surviving ancient features of any note and recording them in sketches or, by Ashby’s time, in photographs.

That kind of work was enthusiastically taken up in Greece, too, especially in Crete and northern Greece, as a host of subsequent papers in the Athens annual volume testifies. But in the work of the Rome school, with less competition from grand excavations, it has continued to hold a special place—it will suffice here to mention the ground-breaking work in the territory of southern Etruria led by J.B. Ward-Perkins from 1950 to 1974. The mention of Etruria also recalls the long-standing British enthusiasm for the Villanovan and Etruscan archaeology of Iron Age Italy, which far antedates the lifetimes of its two best-known British exponents, George Dennis (1814–1898) and David Randall-McIver (1873–1945).

The intervention of two world wars brought substantial interruptions to British archaeological work in the Mediterranean but not major changes. When one consults periodicals or university syllabi of, say, 1960, there is a greater resemblance to those of 1900 than to those of even a few years later. There were minor shifts of emphasis, however, and one that is worth noting is the extension of interest, after World War II, to the proto-history of the early Iron Age in Greece, between about 1100 and 800 b.c., which was to become as much of a British specialty as full prehistory. Another feature of this period was the gradual expansion of British fieldwork into new provinces of the Roman Empire, beginning with Libya and extending later to Tunisia, Spain, France, Bulgaria, and Dalmatia. But greater change, in the fields of method and content, was on the way.

The birth of a self-consciously theoretical approach in archaeology—aptly named by one of its pioneers as “the loss of innocence”—came about in fields far removed in time and space from the ancient Mediterranean. But it did take place above all in the Anglo-Saxon countries,