Overview: A Closer Look At The ‘Remarkable Decade’

Extract

A wealth of data, providing both nuanced understanding and occasionally ‘white noise’

Last year I referred to the ‘remarkable decade’ of archaeological investigation, the decade following the turn of the millennium, when Greece as a nation, and the city of Athens and Attica at large, prepared for the 2004 Olympic Games; when cities and countryside benefited in a variety of ways from the cumulative cultural investment of European Union, philanthropic and commercial funding to expand the scope of the country's heritage. New sites were investigated and new museums opened their doors, with a host of conservators and designers deployed to support them. That was before the economic downturn of 2008 and the consequent contraction of fieldwork, of professional and technical staff, and of research services in general.

The fruits of the ‘remarkable decade’ are nevertheless continuing to appear in books and journals. Robert Pitt provided the first glimpse of these developments in his report on Athens and Attica (AR 57 [2010–2011] 31–48), drawing on the first fascicule of volumes 56–59 [2001–2004] of ADelt, to which archaeologists are required to report their work in the year in which it took place. ADelt is a necessarily cumbersome and slow publication, whose future is uncertain, as Cathy Morgan explained in her introduction to AG 2009–2010 (AR 56 [2009–2010] 1). The complexity of the process of collating, editing, and publishing archaeological work, of all periods, in a single book seems even less viable today as government budgets have become tightly constrained.