ABSTRACT
For a small country like Greece, archaeology has always had a much more central role than in other European countries. Archaeological monuments were soon to become the very emblems of the New Greek state which emerged after the struggle against Ottoman rule in 1821. The first half of the twentieth century, spurred on by the discovery of the Mycenaean and Minoan civilisations, was largely characterised by the quest for establishing the prehistory of the Greeks. Prehistoric archaeology, and with it Theocharis as a professional archaeologist, were forced to face a number of new problems. In many ways the introduction of the cultural-history paradigm in Greek archaeology, even though the limitations as described above were serious, was a predictable development. There was a limited but active response to this bold critical venture by just a small number of archaeologists of the younger generation who tended to group around the journal Anthropologika published at Thessaloniki.
