Beginnings, Early Archaeology

Archaeology: Greece and Rome

Since their composition in ancient Greece the nine volumes of the Histories of Herodotus (c.484-c.425 BC) have guided the research of ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures.

Thucydides (c.458-c.398 BC), in the first of his eight books on the History of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC), describes how on the island of Delos the Athenians excavated graves and from the weapons buried with the bodies learned that more than half of them came from Caria (Anatolia).  

Titus Lucretius Carus (c.98-55 BC) was the first to divide human history into the ages of stone, bronze and iron. Strabo (c.64-00-c.24) tells us that when Julius Caesar (100-44 BC) founded a colony on the site of Corinth, graves were excavated and revealed seventh- and sixth-century BC terracotta reliefs and bronze vessels. Pausanias (fl.c.143-c.176) is famous for his Description of Greece, an important guide to historic places of ancient Greece.

Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (c.72-c.138) informs us that Augustus (76; r.27-00-14) at his villa at Capri collected huge skeletons of extinct land and sea monsters, popularly known as ‘the bones of giants’, and weapons of ancient heroes. This interest in ancient heroes was inspired by Homer (c.750 BC), with his account of the Trojan War (c.1200 BC) in the Iliad and his description of different peoples in the Odyssey.

After the collapse of the Roman Empire (27-00-476) people mostly lost interest in the past. But the ruins of the ancient world dotted across the Mediterranean landscape together with the writings of ancient authors ensured that the memory of the Greek and Roman civilisations survived to the Middle Ages (5th-14th century). During the Renaissance (14th-17th century) the ancient world began to be studied with vigour.

Many medieval cities such as London, York, Paris, Mainz and Cologne were built on top of classical foundations. When the debris from the later buildings revealed the Roman civilisation, wealthy families started to collect artefacts. This habit was adopted by visitors to northern Europe and by the sixteenth century scholars were investigating ruins in Italy.

When Vesuvius erupted in AD 79 it engulfed the two flourishing Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, as well as many rich villas in the area. Chance finds were made at Herculaneum in 1694 and the site was rediscovered in 1709 but systematic excavation did not begin until 1738. The presence of congealed mud forced the excavators to use mining techniques to recover the antiques. In 1750 the mining engineer Karl Jakob Weber (1712-64) was hired to direct the excavations and his systematic approach anticipated modern archaeological methods. Digging at Pompeii began in 1748, and the city’s identity was established in 1763.

In 1755 Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68) went to Italy and spent the rest of his life in study in the Vatican Library (est.1447) and researching the cities of Rome, Florence and Naples. His History of the Art of Antiquity (1764) was the first great analysis of art written from a historical perspective.

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