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This introductory chapter delineates the longstanding marginality of Magna Graecia within classical studies in contrast to its important role in the histories of antiquarianism and classical archaeology, as well as the relationship between the study of Magna Graecia and the emergence of the Southern Question. The approach taken in this book is discussed in the context of recent works on history of archaeology and on the imagining of the South. A brief survey of the debate over the name of Magna Graecia introduces the intricate history of this region's study, including the differentiation of Sicily and Magna Graecia; prominent contrasts between Italian and non-Italian scholarly approache. A consideration of recent exhibitions dedicated to Greek South Italy, both in Italy and in the United States, introduces the current status of these issues, and offers a point of departure for returning to the rich history of the study of Magna Graecia.

In this chapter, Cobb poses the question of what more we have to learn from the study of households given the long history of archaeological thought concerning what such a study is or is not. He addresses the broader issues of this volume by selecting several reoccurring themes as a way to answer this question. Cobb unpacks these themes while examining how each chapter successfully addresses them and advances the field while engaging with the work of other archaeologists and archaeological theorists who came before. He finds that the studies in this volume emphasize the blurry boundaries between the household and the larger fields in which it is enmeshed and that the volume’s authors impel us to think about household-scapes in wide terms that include the experiential dimensions of modernity as well as its political and economic facets.

This chapter examines whether the current research program of the discipline matches the quality of the archaeological record and argues that most processes studied by archaeologists operate over a decade or less. This is 2–3 orders of magnitude faster than the sampling interval and the resolution of archaeological data. This has three consequences. First, most archaeological results are wrong. The chance that an archaeological interpretation, picked among dozens of equifinal alternatives, is valid is vanishingly small. Second, most archaeological research is also unneeded. The short-scale processes studied by archaeologists are borrowed from other disciplines, such as cultural anthropology. These disciplines do not need archaeology to confirm or disprove their ideas. Third, archaeological theory is balkanized. The archaeological literature is crowded with a daunting number of theories and claims that are mutually exclusive. New theories and processes are added to the literature faster than old ones are eliminated. Archaeologists are ignoring the equifinality problem for historical reasons that are outlined here. This was further amplified by the way archaeologists understood uniformitarianism, a human-centric view of the world, and the way archaeologists test hypothesis. Paleontologists, faced a similar problem years ago and solved it by changing their research problem.

When the artistic canon of the Southern Levant coalesced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars thought of the region, then Ottoman Palestine, as the locus of the Bible. The small-scale nature of the archaeological finds as well as their relative dearth reinforced a reliance on biblical narratives as a framework for understanding the culture of the region. Moreover, early scholarship did not recognize the complex regionalism of the Southern Levant or the diversity of its populations. Consequently, the artistic canon that developed did not represent the historical and archaeological realities of the region. This chapter examines the history of how the artistic canon of the Southern Levant formed over the past century of scholarship, why various scholars of the early and middle twentieth century included particular items in the canon, and why these now entrenched representations may or may not be helpful to the discipline’s future.

The seventh chapter addresses the history of archaeology, describing the institutionalization of European prehistory at the turn of the twentieth century. French archaeology played a pivotal role in establishing the conceptual parameters of the discipline, with key figures and prominent institutions featured prominently at this moment of birth. A fervent scientific materialist, Gabriel de Mortillet defined chronological stages for early human culture through technology and labor, opposing any notion of religiosity. By contrast, a Catholic priest, Abbé Henri Breuil, drove archaeology to recognize spirituality as a fundamental aspect of human evolution. He introduced the figure of the sorcerer as an unquestioned male religious leader and practitioner of prehistoric art.

This chapter investigates the concept of innovation and its research history across a number of disciplines, from economics to archaeology. It explores how particular conceptualizations of innovation and progress have been tied up in colonial and racist discourse through the case study of colonial and archaeological assessments of Aboriginal Tasmanian culture and technology. The chapter argues that archaeologists, by dint of their training in exploring worlds and social structures not shaped by post-Industrial-Revolution capitalist relations, are particularly well suited to explore the wider question of how and why people innovate (or don’t).

This chapter charts the twists and turns of Sha Po’s ‘site biography’, or how over a period of eight decades our present understanding of its archaeological treasures gradually came to light. It is a story that reflects Hong Kong archaeology as a whole, in that there were the discoveries made by pre-war pioneers, significant contributions by the Hong Kong Archaeological Society and the Antiquities and Monuments Office (AMO) and, most recently, a series of important finds made by archaeologists working in the commercial sector. During that story of discovery, fieldwork progressed from poorly recorded ‘antiquarian collecting’, through more formalised research digging, into the present era of AMO-licensed excavations working to agreed research designs.

Chapter 2 explores the relationship between the Victorian entertainment industry and the emergent ‘professional’ classical archaeological establishment at mid-century. It offers the first overview of the role that classical sculpture and architecture played in nineteenth-century shows of London, spanning actors posing in bodystockings, medical wax work museums, casts at Madame Tussauds, and the Regent’s Park Colosseum. It provides the first detailed assessment of the public display of classical sculpture in 1850s Britain, at the British Museum and beyond, and situates these displays within the history of classical archaeology. It features detailed discussion of 1850s archaeological engagements at the Crystal Palace, looking at polychromy and the relationship between Greek ‘originals’ and Roman ‘copies’ of sculpture. It argues that in 1850s London, ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’, ‘entertainment’, and ‘education’ ought to be seen in tandem, rather than as polar opposites. It foregrounds the Crystal Palace as a prime location for exploring such connections.

Tom Wynn’s original work that looked at the evolution of stone tool technology using Piaget’s developmental sequence was the beginning of productive research into the evolution of hominin and human cognition. In this chapter, I evaluate those beginnings and discusses recent attempts to provide a more satisfactory understanding of changes in stone tool technologies, including work by Philip Barnard and William McGrew, subsequent work by Tom Wynn, and my own work with various collaborators. It suggests that some of the previous understandings of cognitive evolution were shaped by the fact that approaches to stone tools were largely determined in the nineteenth century. I propose some new ways of looking at stone tools and the sort of story that allows for more productive models of the evolution of human cognition.