The Nation and its ruins: Antiquity, archaeology, and national imagination in Greece

(with detailed bookmarks for text & figures)

This innovative, extensively illustrated study examines how classical antiquities and archaeology contributed significantly to the production of the modern Greek nation and its national imagination. It also shows how, in return, national imagination has created and shaped classical antiquities and archaeological practice from the 19th century to the present. Yannis Hamilakis covers a diverse range of topics, including the role of antiquities in the foundation of the Greek state in the 19th century, the Elgin marbles controversy, the role of archaeology under dictorial regimes, the use of antiquities in the detention camps of the Greek civil war, and the discovery of the so-called tomb of Philip of Macedonia.

"Hamilakis is one of the few scholars studying the reception of ancient Greece using a real diversity of material remains . . . Combining ethnographic and sociological data with primary documentary and visual culture, he covers a rare diachronic range of receiving societiesmainly within Greece, where the remains have an especially strong resonance... These extremely important and novel angles of research are now combined in a highly readable and important book..."-- Saro Wallace, Classical Review

"There is no doubt that The Nation and Its Ruins will become essential reading for all interested in the deeper sociopolitical dimensions of the history of archaeology . . . Hamilakis has produced the most perceptive and penetrating analysis to date of the modern social context of Greek archaeology and has provided an invaluable model for those who seek to embark on similar research in other regions of the world."-- Neil Silberman, American Anthropologist

"Hamilakis gives a fascinating and sympathetic...account of Greek attitudes."--John Boardman, Common Knowledge

The first investigation of the production and use in Greece of the material, as opposed to the simply literary, classical past.