This volume explores the ways local communities perceive, experience, and interact with archaeological sites in Greece, as well as with the archaeologists and government officials who construct and study such places. In so doing, it reveals another side to sites that have been revered as both birthplace of Western civilization and basis of the modern Greek nation. The conceptual terrain of those who live near such sites is complex and furrowed with ambivalence, confusion, and resentment. For many local residents, these sites are gated enclaves, unexplained and off limits, except when workers are needed. While cleavages between residents and archaeologists have received attention elsewhere, they have been little examined in Greece, where they are often masked by sweeping statements on the glory of antiquity that overlook the extent to which ordinary Greeks have become disconnected from these places in their midst. The complexity of this situation, freighted as it is with two centuries of archaeological practice, is explored in this volume from multiple viewpoints and with respect to sites from prehistoric to Ottoman and beyond. Several chapters trace the origins of the disconnection between archaeological sites and communities, relating it to the ways in which early travelers appropriated sites for their own purposes, the subsequent move of archaeology onto the slippery slope created by the travelers, and the concurrent depiction of Greek peasants as passive and uninformed. Other chapters chronicle the active ways in which communities have contested the development and representation of particular sites and even sometimes created alternative landscapes with other points of entry to the valued Greek past. Still others recount and assess recent archaeological efforts to reconnect residents to the sites in their midst. Archaeology in Situ will be of particular value to those interested in modern Greek studies, Greek archaeology, Classics, public archaeology, archaeological ethics, anthropology, cultur

This volume explores the ways local communities perceive, experience, and interact with archaeological sites in Greece, as well as with the archaeologists and government officials who construct and study such places. In so doing, it reveals another side to sites that have been revered as both birthplace of Western civilization and basis of the modern Greek nation. The conceptual terrain of those who live near such sites is complex and furrowed with ambivalence, confusion, and resentment. For many local residents, these sites are gated enclaves, unexplained and off limits, except when workers are needed.

The essays in this volume are united by their attention to the many ways in which residents of Greece's southern Argolid peninsula have attempted to shelter, feed, and advance the economic situation of their families over the last three centuries. This work juxtaposes a series of research projects undertaken in various communities, projects that, taken together, have made the southern Argolid the focus of more ethnographic and ethnohistorical study than any other comparable region of Greece. Ethnographic, geographic, historical, and archaeological methodologies are integrated to yield an image of the southern Argolid as a contingent countryside whose boundaries, character, people, and external connections have been reconfigured time and again.
Such notions strengthen general reformulations occurring within Greek ethnography and speak directly to archaeological attempts to connect the Greek past and present. This volume, the fourth in a series of books deriving from the Argolid Exploration Project conducted by Stanford University, sets forth the material conditions of rural Greek life as mutable and negotiated in ways that complement archaeological interest in the repeated settlement fluctuations of the Greek past. It also exemplifies recent ethnographic shifts in conceiving other aspects of modern Greek life.
The volume replaces assumptions of village longevity with inquiry into what causes settlements to form and grow or to decline. It places idealized inheritance patterns alongside records of actual land transactions. Houses expand, contract, and change over time. The social boundaries among shepherds, farmers, and sailors blur through an exploration of personal occupation histories. In short, the book reexamines and questions many of the categories and concepts by which rural Greece has long been represented.