of prehistoric Greece. The Mycenaean Age, written by Tsountas and J. Irving Manatt and published in 1897, was the first great synthetic work of Aegean prehistory, and the book made the subject the major branch of Mediterranean archaeology that it has been ever since.

Improvements in excavation techniques were accompanied by a general systematizing of the analysis of artifacts, particularly pottery, the basis of most archaeological dating. Before and after World War I, the Englishman Alan Wace and the American Carl Blegen complemented Tsountas’s work by producing a coherent and precise chronology of pre-Mycenaean pottery. In the field of classical archaeology, the first half of the twentieth century was characterized by connoisseurship. Archaeological knowledge was ordered and classified, with artifacts being sorted and pigeonholed into vast corpora of inscriptions, coins, potsherds, figurines, lamps, and so on. The ultimate analysis was that of Greek vases by the Oxford art historian john beazley. By identifying characteristic stylistic traits and mannerisms, as well as using the occasional signatures, he managed to detect the “hands” and “workshops” of individual ancient painters. Classical archaeology remained subservient either to art history, with statues, vases, and buildings being taken out of context as works of art, or to textual history, where the objects merely illustrated the accounts of Thucydides, Euripides, and the other classical writers.

Further changes came to archaeological methods and interpretations in the 1960s with the advent of scientific techniques and processual archaeology. Prehistorians such as Colin Renfrew led the way in modeling the influences and processes that had caused social change in the past. Most classical archaeologists remained firmly entrenched within their empiricist and descriptive traditions until the 1970s and 1980s when scholars such as Anthony Snodgrass began using the contextual analysis and theories of social change that are more normally associated with prehistory to question the rich range of data from the Iron Age and classical period.

Another striking change in archaeological methodology in Greece during the last two decades of the twentieth century was a rapid growth in the popularity of archaeological survey and landscape archaeology. These involved the use of a very different technique than that used in the exploration and site-hunting by earlier archaeologists. Teams of field-walkers covered large areas of landscape systematically and intensively, recording and sampling the surface material they found. This allowed an examination of small rural sites such as farmsteads and hamlets and when combined with geomorphological mapping and other disciplinary studies, enabled investigators to study the development of agriculture, ancient soil management, and a host of other off-site activities.

Because such survey projects found material of all periods, especially the late post-Roman period, they sparked an important interest in the archaeology of medieval and Ottoman Greece, in striking contrast to the classical purists of the nineteenth century. In 1988, the Greek government amended the antiquities law to allow each school to run three surveys and three excavations each year, and Greece now leads the eastern half of the Mediterranean in the field of archaeological survey.

The Archaeology of the Greek Nation

“Hellenic archaeology, gentlemen, is not a profession but a sacred mission.” So spoke Georgios Oikonomos, secretary of the Archaeological Society of Athens, during preparations for the society’s centenary in 1937. Ever since the War of Independence, in the first third of the nineteenth century, archaeology had been something greater than a job or an interest. Classical antiquities were considered to be almost sacred relics that expressed the innermost spirit of the Hellenic nation, which, above all, was the reason why the Greek state was determined to keep control over all artifacts and excavations and why it worked so hard from as early as the 1820s to educate future generations about the importance of the classical past.

The precise nature of this belief, of course, varied according to occasion and individual and developed in accordance with changing ideological and political conditions. Christos Tsountas, for example, was interested in the Mycenaeans for their own sake as they had an important and