This volume assembles fourteen highly influential articles written by Michael H. Jameson over a period of nearly fifty years, edited and updated by the author himself. They represent both the scope and the signature style of Jameson's engagement with the subject of ancient Greek religion. The collection complements the original publications in two ways: firstly, it makes the articles more accessible; and secondly, the volume offers readers a unique opportunity to observe that over almost five decades of scholarship Jameson developed a distinctive method, a signature style, a particular perspective, a way of looking that could perhaps be fittingly called a 'Jamesonian approach' to the study of Greek religion. This approach, recognizable in each article individually, becomes unmistakable through the concentration of papers collected here. The particulars of the Jamesonian approach are insightfully discussed in the five introductory essays written for this volume by leading world authorities on polis religion.

This volume presents the results of the Argolid Exploration Project, an archaeological, historical and geological survey of a part of the Peloponnese of Greece. It is a study in human ecology that analyses the dynamic relationship between human communities and their environments, both cultural and natural. Before 8,000 years ago, particularly during the last Ice Age, the most important determinant of landscape evolution was climate change. However, in the last 8,000 years, human settlement and land use have had drastic effects upon the land, resulting in deforestation and erosion. For this period a cyclical pattern of settlement growth and decline that correlates with successive episodes of catastrophic damage to the soils and environment is revealed. A shorter study of the Project intended for the general reader has already been published (Beyond the Acropolis by van Andel and Runnels, Stanford, 1987), and at least two other volumes will continue to set out the findings.