Far removed from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, classical archaeology emerged as a modern scientific discipline in the late 19th century, through the West's need to establish a distinct intellectual genealogy. The scientific program that has been applied for the last 150 or so years, both in the West and in the rest of the world, as "classical archaeology" combines the love for the classical, first cultivated by the Romans, with the improvised "archaeologies" of the intervening centuries, having formed a strikingly idealistic archaeological paradigm, consistently oriented towards empirical method, aesthetic approaches, fetishism of the find, and the idealization of the ancient - often anonymous, shadowy, and usually invented - creators.

In "Archaeologies of the Classical," Dimitris Plantzos examines how classical archaeology, as an independent scientific discipline, organized the research and interpretation of classical civilization for most of the 20th century. The study aims to reveal the ideological parameters that determine the diachronic and synchronic image of Greco-Roman civilization through an expanded, interdisciplinary theoretical discussion. It attempts to correlate developments in the field of classical archaeology with corresponding (though not always parallel) developments in archaeology in general, as well as in history, anthropology, and ethnology, as well as the new data emerging from the theoretical discussion in the fields of modern history and cultural studies in the second half of the 20th century.

The book reflects on the epistemological project of classical archaeology at a critical juncture for the discipline, when history and the relationship between humans and the past are being reexamined and questioned, and when scientific methodology - both theoretical and practical sciences - is being reestablished internationally.