Archaeologies of the Greek Past

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

Social memory is a powerful political and emotional force, although recovering the shared memories of past societies is notoriously difficult. Employing three case studies from the history of ancient Greece, this 2002 book explores how the evidence of landscape and monuments can reveal commemorative practices and collective amnesias in such societies.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.