fascinating culture. But he also felt it was important to refute the views of his foreign colleagues who declared that the Mycenaean civilization was non-European and certainly non-Greek. To Tsountas, the Hellenic spirit could appear at different times in different forms, and the rich culture of late Bronze Age Mycenae was one of those manifestations. He was proved right in a very literal sense in 1952 when the British architect Michael Ventris deciphered the Linear B tablets from the palace archives of the late Bronze Age and discovered that they were written in an early form of Greek.

In 1833, newly independent Greece encompassed only a fraction of its current area, and as new areas were gradually acquired, they had to be incorporated into the state. Archaeology played a vital role in this process of nation building. When Macedonia (that is, the current Greek province of Macedonia) became part of Greece after the Balkan wars of 1912–1913, a Greek Archaeological Service of Macedonia was immediately set up, and numerous excavation projects were organized. It was initially rather awkward that the area lacked much of the classical architecture and artwork of southern Greece, and as a result, there was a strong focus on the much richer Byzantine culture of the region. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Byzantine period had been considered unimportant or even shameful, a time when Greece was ruled by an outside empire. Now it was incorporated into the Hellenic heritage, and the Byzantine churches of Thessaloníki that had been converted into mosques were restored to their original “pure” form.

Archaeology in Macedonia, and its role within the Hellenic nation, received a major boost in 1977 when Manolis Andronikos discovered a rich fourth-century-b.c. tomb at Vergina in Macedonia. Quite apart from the elaborate wall paintings, armor, and silver vessels, a gold ossuary within a marble sarcophagus contained bones wrapped in gold and purple cloth that were identified as those of Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great. The outer chamber of the tomb also contained a gold box holding cremated ashes and was embossed with a star burst, or “star of Vergina,” a symbol of the Macedonian kings. This archaeological discovery was widely believed to be a direct link with the Hellenic past. Macedonia was suddenly flooded with up to forty archaeological projects a year, and a wealth of publications appeared, both academic and popular. The star of Vergina became the national symbol of Greece in 1993, and when Andronikos died in 1992, he was given a state funeral and the honor of being the first Greek archaeologist to be depicted on a postage stamp.

The importance of archaeology to Greek national identity has, of course, led to disputes with other groups making rival claims to the past. One was with the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, which also claimed the star of Vergina as a state symbol. Most well known is the dispute over the Parthenon (or Elgin) Marbles, which became a major national issue in the 1980s owing to the hugely popular ex-actress and minister of culture, Melina Mercouri. The campaign for the restitution of the sculptures by the British Museum is inspired above all by an almost religious belief in their centrality to Hellenic culture and identity. Manolis Andronikos, in a 1983 newspaper article, declared that “these sculptures belong to the most sacred monument of this country, the temple of Athena, which expresses the essence of the Greek spirit and incorporates the deepest nature of the Athenian democracy.”

Conclusions

Greek archaeology has never been static or monolithic. Nor is its history a mere list of discoveries and acquired facts. The antiquities of Greece and the societies that produced them were major players in the European Enlightenment, the development of western art, the new academic discipline of archaeology, and above all in the formation of the identity and character of an independent Greek nation. Such is Greece’s archaeological wealth and variety that there is still material to satisfy all new trends in archaeology, from scientific techniques of dating and analysis to an interest in the entire landscape of a region to the recent growth in underwater archaeology. New trends will arise, but Greece will always have the material to satisfy their pursuits.