HEROIC TIME: MONUMENTS AND THE PAST IN MESSENIA, SOUTHWEST GREECE

Summary The archaeological structure of a landscape in terms of the history of settlement and burial in a particular locale through time, together with the construction, development and importance of the monuments placed within it, has become a feature of recent landscape archaeology in the study of Neolithic and Bronze Age Britain. The present paper introduces some of these themes into the study of the Messenia, southwest Greece, approaching two main problems. First, how the location chosen for the Late Bronze Age Palace of Nestor related to earlier patterns of habitation of the Middle Helladic period (an issue hitherto ignored by previous ‘period‐specific’studies) and, secondly, the later relevance of the Bronze Age landscape in the Iron Age when issues such as the ‘Past’and ‘History’came to be of great significance in Messenia.