Anthony Snodgrass

Mediterranean survey and the city.

The Mediterranean, and especially Greece, provides fine conditions for field-survey – long and intense human occupation, good surface exposure, and distinctive, diagnostic ceramics. Where the Classical authors are conspicuously reticent about the countryside, field-survey can provide a rural picture, as well as the settlement patterns of prehistory. Here, the methods of field-survey return from the countryside to look at the cities, formerly the preserve of the excavator.

The Hoplite Reform and History

I have tried to analyse elsewhere the archaeological evidence for Greek armour and weapons, and their possible effects on tactics, in the critical period of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. There, I was of necessity concerned with the monumental evidence, and did not look far beyond it. But there are historical implications which should be faced and also, I think, some further historical support for the conclusions there reached. The conclusions were briefly these. The equipment of arms and armour, which modern writers tend to group together as the ‘hoplite panoply’, was originally a motley assemblage. Certain of its components—the long iron sword and spear—were part of the equipment of most warriors of the era, and of many periods before and since. Other items resemble those used by Mycenaean warriors some five centuries earlier: these include the bronze plate-corslet, the greave and (an optional accessory) the ankle-guard. I cannot believe, with some scholars, that such advanced and costly products of the bronze-smith had been produced continuously throughout the Dark Age that followed the fall of the Mycenaean civilisation; and indeed for at least 400 years there is no evidence of any kind that they were. Rather, they were revived or readopted: the corslet apparently under the influence of the metal-working cultures of Central Europe and Italy, the greave and ankle-guard spontaneously, although the Epic tradition had never forgotten their earlier use. Other items again, the closed helmet of the type that the Greeks called Corinthian, and the large round shield with arm-band and hand-grip, were Greek variants devised as an improvement on foreign models, principally the metal open-faced helmets and round single-grip shields used by the Assyrians, Urartians and other Eastern peoples. The combination of all these elements together was an original Greek notion; as was their later association with a novel form of massed infantry tactics, the phalanx.

A Paradigm Shift in Classical Archaeology

This article, a revised version of the 13th McDonald Lecture given on 21 November 2001, sets the recent and partial transformation in the content and practice of Classical archaeological against the background of Kuhns well-known work, first published in 1962, on paradigm and revolution in the scientific disciplines. Perhaps the most important question in this context — how would we know when a change in paradigm had taken place? — is harder to answer for a humanities discipline than for a science. But the attempt is made, first to set out a traditional paradigm for the subject; then to give examples of new approaches which seem to satisfy many of Kuhns criteria for the introduction of a new paradigm; and, more briefly, to show that other approaches, innovatory though they may be, by their nature cannot bring about such a change. Whether a true paradigm shift has been set in motion, the future alone will show.

Book reviews. Charalambos Bouras, Maria Ioannidou & Ian Jenkins (ed.). Acropolis restored. viii+74 pages, 152 colour illustrations. 2012. London: British Museum Press; 978-0-86159-187-9 paperback £ 25 (£ 22.50 members).

certainly not the average one. For others, however, The complete archaeology of Greece is a valuable source of information, drawing a broad canvas, and, most significantly, exposing important questions concerning each period. The archaeological record of Greece, from the earliest finds to the present, is woven into a personal, at once comprehensive and concise account. Bintliff ’s book is a generous reciprocation of Greek Philoxenia, a distillation of his long experience of Greek archaeology in the field, his theoretical positions and methodological tools, reaching out further than to the people of Greece alone.

An Archaeology of Greece. The Present State and Future Scope of a Discipline

Classical archaeology probably enjoys a wider appeal than any other branch of classical or archaeological studies. As an intellectual and academic discipline, however, its esteem has not matched its popularity. Here, Anthony Snodgrass argues that classical archaeology has a rare potential in the whole field of the study of the past to make innovative discoveries and apply modern approaches by widening the aims of the discipline.