Jonathan M. Hall - Reclaiming the Past: Argos and Its Archaeological Heritage in the Modern Era

RECLAIMING THE PAST

ARGOS AND ITS ARCHAEOLOGICAL HERITAGE IN THE MODERN ERA

J ONATHAN M. H ALL

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

Maps

Figures

Tables

In many respects, this book represents something of a nostos . I first visited Argos thirty years ago in connection with my doctoral research on ethnic identity in the Early Iron Age and Archaic Argolid. During subsequent visits, I spent several days traipsing the streets of the town, armed with a detailed map of individual properties that the staff in the dimarchio (town hall) had generously allowed me to copy. My intention was to create distribution maps of the burials that were regularly coming to light in the course of rescue excavations carried out by the Greek Archaeological Service but which were generally recorded only with reference to the street address at which they were discovered (all this in blissful ignorance of the fact that the cole Fran aise dAth nes was about to publish its own distribution maps that were far more accurate and professional than anything I could have produced). In the course of my peregrinations, however, I became acutely aware of how the states concern with digging and conserving the past was often in uneasy tension with the desires of contemporary residents to redevelop their properties and regenerate their town. That appreciation for the problematic nature of archaeological heritage is one that has remained with me over the years, but it has more recently been reinforced by a growing interest in the modern history of Greecean interest that is the direct result of my involvement, over the past twenty years, in the University of Chicagos Study Abroad Program in Greece.

Those twin strands come together in the present book. On the one hand, this work is (as far as I know) the only anglophone account of the postantique history of Argos, a relatively modest market town in the northeastern Peloponnese with a demeanor that belies its importance in antiquity. On the other, it pays particular attention to how the physical traces of antiquity were experienced, by locals and outsiders alike, from the latter part of the eighteenth century through to the middle of the twentieth century (though I do briefly discuss some subsequent events). The upper chronological terminus is relatively easy to explain: there is precious little source material to work with that predates the last decades of the eighteenth century. The lower terminus, instead, requires a little more justification. First, I am by training an ancient historian and, while it has been liberating to mine relatively unknown archival sources (a luxury seldom available to those who study antiquity), I claim no competence in the techniques of contemporary historians and sociologistsinterviews, questionnaires, oral histories, and the like. Second, as will quickly become apparent, archaeological heritage can beand, at Argos, certainly isa contentious issue. As a xenos (outsider) myself, I am anxious to avoid taking sides in contemporary or near-contemporary disputes and putting my Argive friends and informants in a difficult position.

In the following chapters, I am not claiming that the issues and concerns addressed in this book are unique to Argos. At the same time, Argos belongs to a relatively small subset of urban environments that have been continuously settled since at least the Bronze Age and in which antiquities have always remained visible in the landscape. The best-known parallel would be Athens. By contrast, towns such as Sparta or Eretria were new (re)foundations of the period immediately following the Greek Revolutionary War, while a settlement such as Thebes, which was more or less continuously occupied, boasted little in the way of visible monuments. As the British naval officer Edward Giffard commented in 1837, Corinth has its heavy Doric temple; Argos its theatre; Sparta the presumed tomb of Leonidas; Messene its splendid walls and towers; Delphi its excavated tombs and the foundations of its temples; but Thebes has nothing (Giffard 1837, 37374).

Since this is a novel field of study for me, I am especially indebted to a number of friends and colleagues for their advice, assistance, support, and encouragement. In particular, I should like to express my gratitude to Ioanna Antoniadou, Pierre Aupert, Anna Banaka, Christopher Brown, Michael Dietler, Helma Dik, Nikolaos Dimakis, Sylvian Fachard, Elizabeth Key Fowden, Brian Joseph, Gregory Jusdanis, Anthony Kaldellis, Dimitris Nakassis, Anna Philippa-Touchais, Gary Reger, Andrew Stewart, and Yiannis Xydopoulos. I would also like to thank the two anonymous readers for Cornell University Press for their extremely useful guidance and suggestions. Needless to say, none is responsible for any errors or interpretive choices that I have made. I pay a particularly warm tribute to two colleagues who have provided invaluable help: Tasos Tsagos, who maintains the incomparable online resource Argoliki Archiaki Vivliothiki Istorias kai Politismou (Archival Library of History and Culture for the Argolid: