Archaeology is a science, but it is one that changes over the years in response to the questions its practitioners want it to answer. Today, the 'new archaeology' involves new techniques, new visions of the past and new appraisals of old ideas which provide us with a different view of our common past. While the traditional archaeological outlook focused on the rich and powerful, and their palaces and temples, the new view looks more at the daily life of the bulk of the ancient population. While the old archaeology thought that civilisations grew and invaded their neighbours, leading to dramatic collapses, the new view is that most cultures developed by themselves and that conflicts between them were rarely catastrophic. Finally, while the traditional idea was that ancient civilisations were sealed off from outside influences, the new notion is that they were in constant communication with their neighbours. The following sections show how new perspectives can change archaeology's vision of the past – and suggest that in the future archaeology may surprise us again with new information about our past.
	1900 EVANS and KNOSSOS British archaeologist Arthur Evans begins excavating the ruins of Knossos on the Greek island of Crete. Over the next 35 years, Evans excavates and describes an entirely unknown civilisation, the first literate people of Europe. He names them Minoans, after Minos, the legendary king of Crete who appears in ancient Greek myths. True to the traditional view of archaeology, Evans calls the buildings he finds 'the Palace of Minos' and speculates that the Minoans had a paradisical life and a great sea empire. By the 1970s, other archaeologists question this view. Finds of the bones of two small children, which seem to have been expertly cut up, suggest that this ancient culture used human sacrifice, and a closer look at the palace ruins suggests that this was probably a temple. New archaeology also casts doubt on the idea that the Minoans had an empire with rigid boundaries; instead, the situation was much more fluid, with, for example, Minoan-style paintings being found in ancient Egyptian sites.
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	1959 THROCKMORTON and BASS and TURKEY A marine historian, Peter Throckmorton, finds a sunken ship off Cape Gelidonya, on the rocky southern Turkish coast, which is known as the coast of 10,000 shipwrecks. Throckmorton maps hundreds of wrecks in the seas between Greece and Turkey, many of which are more than 3,000 years old, and date from a time when the Mediterranean sea was bustling with traffic between ancient cultures. He is joined by archaeologist George Bass, who develops special techniques for working under water. In 1984, Bass excavates a Bronze Age merchant boat that was wrecked off Uluburun. Its cargo reveals many details about the raw materials that ancient peoples traded and is evidence that these cultures were in constant communication with each other.
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	1960s FLANNERY and SAN JOSÉ MAGOTE Professor Kent Flannery of Michigan University excavates the site of San José Magote in the Oaxaca valley in southwest Mexico. As well as looking at massive monuments such as the nearby pyramids, Flannery looks very closely at the remains of the lives of ordinary people. His team discovers the foundations of an ancient village house in San José Magote, which after being carbon-dated to 1300BC, turns out to be the oldest house in Central America. Artefacts such as the quern, which is a stone used for grinding corn, show that the staple diet of this population has remained the same despite political changes such as the invasion of the Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century. New archaeology is more interested in the continuity of ancient cultures than in the monuments of their rulers.
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	1970 MARINATOS and MARATHON The Greek archaeologist Spyridon Marinatos searches for gold in a Mycenaean tomb at Marathon in Greece. Instead of the fabled riches of Homer, he finds a Russian-style kurgan grave, which has a distinctive mound shape and is built up with stones. The traditional explanation is that these kurgan graves, which originate in Russia in the 4th millennium BC, were made by a group of nomadic people who had travelled down the Danube river into the Middle East, Turkey and Greece, conquering and replacing the populations that they came across. Marinatos finds the remains of a horse and at first this seems to support the explanation that the kurgan folk were invading warriors. More recently, however, new archaeology has used genetic analysis to show that the population of Greece has been stable over thousands of years and that the idea of a great invasion of ancient kurgans is wrong. Kurgan graves are probably evidence of cultural influence rather than conquest.
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	1990s BIETAK and TELL EL DAB'A Professor Manfred Beitak of the Austrian Archaeological Institute excavates enormous murals at Tell el Da'ba in the Nile Delta. Although the site is an ancient Egyptian one, the murals are identical to those painted by artists in ancient Crete. Beitak amasses 400 boxes of wall paintings, about the same amount as has been found at Knossos in Crete. He concludes that ancient civilisations were much more in contact with each other than has traditionally been thought. Instead of the old scenario of great invasions, new archaeology sees the past as a series of mutually influential contacts, where neighbouring cultures shared ideas and craftsmen, such as mural painters, and interacted with each other on a daily basis.
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