ABSTRACT
The origins of this volume were a session (where many of the chapters were first presented) at the EuroTAG conference at Southampton on 16 December 1992 entitled ‘New Directions in Classical Archaeology’. To have a session at the annual TAG (Theoretical Archaeologists’ Group) Conference composed entirely of papers in Classical archaeology is an event rare in itself, even more so to have the whole session examining only the historic periods of the discipline. The aim of the session, and latterly this volume, was to present a forum for the interdisciplinary research currently being carried out by Classical archaeologists, and it was for this reason that the title (revised from that of the original session) refers back to Colin Renfrew’s paper of 1980 which made pleas for the inception of such integrated approaches (Renfrew 1980). The chapters in the volume indicate a desire on the part of many scholars to develop further previous research in Classical archaeology, to re-contextualise data and to pose new research questions through the restoration of links to classics and ancient history as well as anthropology. Archaeology is, after all, a study of the past of man and emphasis is laid therefore upon the examination of societies and social structures through the archaeological record in a number of different ways.
