The Argos Plain through its ages and my ages

Abstract

This article focusses on one of my favourite landscapes, the Plain of Argos, and my involvement with its Bronze Age landscape over a period of more than forty years. In 1972 I left Cambridge University at the start of my PhD, to begin gathering research data in the field in Greece, armed with not much more than the topic ‘The Prehistory of Greece’. However I did have one central methodology and indeed philosophy in my mind, acquired as a BA student at Cambridge during informal supervisions with Eric Higgs and subsequently on fieldwork with him or his research team in Israel and Italy. At this time, the start of the 1970s, Ecology was emerging from an obscure branch of Botany into a globally-significant approach to our place in a dynamic biosphere, and Higgs’ Palaeoeconomy Movement in Cambridge began to attract many other young PhD and Postdoctoral scholars in Archaeology who were dissatisfied with Culture History approaches.