Archaeologies of the Greek Past: Landscape, Monuments, and Memories / Edition 1

by Susan E. Alcock

Overview

Social or collective memory has recently become a much debated subject in academic disciplines and in the popular media. People in antiquity surely possessed similar shared memories, but except for the limited accounts of elite authors—they are notoriously difficult to recover. This book explores how material culture, in particular the evidence of landscape and of monuments, can reveal commemorative practices and collective amnesias in past societies. Three case studies are considered—Greece in the early Roman period, Hellenistic and Roman Crete, and Messenia from Archaic to Hellenistic times.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521890007
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	08/15/2002
Series:	The W. B. Stanford Memorial Lectures
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	959,823
Product dimensions:	6.69(w) x 9.61(h) x 0.51(d)

About the Author

Susan E. Alcock is Associate Professor of Classical Archaeology and Classics at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Graecia Capta (Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

"[T]his important book, whose open-minded approach eschews glib labels and thus gives plenty of space for the imaginative interpretations essential to the theme, is relevant for cultural and political history...[Alcock] writes with confidence and authority to suggest new and diverse ways to approach what was surely an important part of the ancient world." Bryn Mawr Classical Review

"Alcock challenges us to see that people meander and move through a world populated with buildings and texts that speak, in a way, to one another, and to the pedestrians wandering among them. Don't forget to listen for the rhetoric of the landscape within the city and the rhetoric of the city within the empire. Alcock encourages us to put our ear to the very rocky ground, listening for what are considered usable memories, pasts convenient for present appropriation." - Laura Nasrallah, Harvard Divinity School

From the Publisher