Archaeologies of the Greek Past
Landscape, Monuments, and Memories

This 2002 book explores social memory in the ancient Greek world using the evidence of landscapes and monuments.

Susan E. Alcock (Author)

9780521813556, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 15 August 2002

240 pages, 25 b/w illus. 9 maps
25.5 x 18 x 2.1 cm, 0.574 kg

'Alcock offers an insightful study of that dynamic relationship between monument and landscape and encourages students of antiquity to recontextualise the archaeological evidence of the past in the past. All historians, not just landscape historians, should read this book.' Landscape History

Social memory - the shared remembrances of group experience - creates shared identity, and provides people with both an image of their past and a design for their future. But how are we to conceive the memories of past peoples such as, for example, the ancient Greeks? This 2002 book makes a strong case for the use of archaeology, particularly the evidence of landscape and of monuments, to trace patterns in commemoration and forgetfulness. Three detailed case studies (early Roman Greece, Hellenistic and Roman Crete, and Messenia in Archaic to Hellenistic times) focus on societies undergoing different types of social transformation. Material evidence allows us to observe how groups responded to these challenges, and how they made different uses of the past, in the past.

1. Archaeologies of memory
2. Old Greece within the Empire
3. Cretan inventions
4. Being Messenian
5. Three short stories about Greek memory.

Subject Areas: Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Classical Greek & Roman archaeology [HDDK], Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA], European history [HBJD]