L. E. Talalay

The Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan has a long and impressive history of archaeological fieldwork activity in the Mediterranean, the Near East, and Egypt. Over the past 80 years, the Museum has helped sponsor nearly two dozen projects in Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Israel, Libya, Tunisia, Greece, and Armenia. In the Field presents a well-illustrated and informative summary account, with accompanying bibliographies, of each of these significant projects.

This volume represents a pioneering examination of the nature and identities of Aegean prehistory as a discipline. Emerging from a workshop that generated lively debate among a wide cross-section of scholars, it offers one of the first published attempts to situate Aegean prehistory within a modern self-critical and reflexive context. The chapters and commentaries together yield a multidisciplinary discourse, covering such topics as the current health and academic status of the field, the political and social parameters of the discipline, the relationship between Aegean prehistory and Hellenism, and the discovery of the "Aegean" by Greek modernists.