The Nation and its Ruins

• Winner of the 2009 Edmund Keeley Book Prize
• The first investigation of the production and use in Greece of the material, as opposed to the simply literary, classical past
• Explores a number of currently contested issues on the nature of national imagination, and the properties, agency, and power of materiality

Readership: Scholars and students of classics, archaeology, anthropology, European history (especially modern Greek history).

Yannis Hamilakis, Senior Lecturer in Archaeology, University of Southampton

"adds a distinctive new voice and vision" - Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

1: Memories cast in marble: introduction
2: The `soldiers' the `priests'. and the `hospitals for contagious diseases': the producers of archaeological matter-realities
3: From the Western to indigenous Hellenism: archaeology, antiquity, and the invention of modern Greece
4: The archaeologist as shaman the sensory national archaeology of Manolis Andronikos
5: Spartan visions: antiquity and the Metaxas dictatorship
6: The other Parthenon: antiquity and national memory at the concentration camp
7: Nostalgia for the whole: the Parthenon (or `Elgin') marbles
8: The nation in ruins? Conclusions