Double Colonization: The Story of the Excavations of the Athenian Agora (1924-1931)

by Yannis Hamilakis

Hesperia, Volume 82, Issue 1
Page(s): 153-177
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2972/hesperia.82.1.0153
Year: 2013
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ABSTRACT:

The author takes a fresh look at the contract forged between the Greek state and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens for the excavations of the Athenian Agora. Clashes with evicted locals and the pervasive tensions that accompanied the affair are most commonly seen as a confrontation between colonialist scholarly interests and mundane local concerns. The relationship, however, was more complex. A process of double colonization was in operation, one driven both by the ideals of Hellenism and by the apparatus of modernist archaeology. National and colonial archaeologies are not distinct forms, but hybrid expressions of the same phenomenon: Western capitalist modernity.