great foreign excavators who made such an impact on sites, on the local inhabitants, and on the development of archaeological practice: the story is often dominated by big names such as heinrich schliemann, arthur evans, and carl blegen. Their importance is undisputed, although there are other big names to be added to the list, names such as christos tsountas, Georgios Oikonomos, and Spyridon Marinatos. But this concentration on the “great men of history” draws attention away from the social importance of archaeology in Greece over the last 200 years. Countless women and men have worked as skilled or unskilled laborers on excavations, had careers in the Greek Archaeological Service, and passed on the results of research to schoolchildren, students, and tourists. Knowledge and interest in archaeology, thanks mainly to its importance within the education system, are much wider even than that and have been since the nineteenth century.

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Archaeological Sites in Greece

On a broader level, archaeology in Greece—as elsewhere—has been closely bound up with changing cultural and political conditions. People’s interests and interpretations depend to a large extent on prevailing intellectual fashions and can often be influenced by political pressure or social position. The Parthenon in the nineteenth century, for example, was variously a link with the great Hellenic past, a model of