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Classical archaeology properly the study of the whole material culture of ancient Greece and Rome, is often understood in a somewhat narrower sense. *Epigraphy, the study of inscriptions on permanent materials, is today more widely seen as a branch of historical rather than of archaeological enquiry; while numismatics, the study of coins (see coinage), has become a largely independent discipline. The chronological limits are also open to debate. In the case of the Greek world, it has become common to distinguish ‘ancient’ from ‘prehistoric’, and to treat the archaeology of early Greece—at any rate down to the late bronze age—as lying outside the scope of classical archaeology. For Italy, the same is true down to a later date, after the beginning of the iron age. There is wider agreement in treating the collapse of pagan civilization as the terminus at the lower end.

No less important than these explicit divisions are the unwritten, yet widely accepted constraints on the range of material culture accepted as appropriate for study. These constraints, which have helped to maintain an intellectual distance between classical and other archaeologies, have privileged the study of works of representational art and monumental architecture as the core, sometimes almost the entirety, of the subject. A second prominent attitude, one which indeed inspired the study of the material remains of antiquity in the first place, has been attention to the surviving ancient texts, with the aim of matching them with material discoveries. These assumptions can be traced back to the earliest stages of the history of the discipline; topographical exploration, which also began very early, understandably shared the same deference to the texts. The collection of works of art, a prerogative of wealth rather than of learning, helped to confer on the subject in its early years a social prestige at least as prominent as its intellectual. From Renaissance times in Italy and France, from the early 17th cent. in England, and from somewhat later in other parts of northern Europe and North America, these forces propelled the subject forward. Such excavation as took place before the mid-19th cent. was usually explicitly directed towards the recovery of works of art, with the textual evidence serving as a guide or, where it was not directly applicable, as a kind of arbiter. Once the volume of available finds reached a certain critical mass, a further motive came into play: that of providing models for the better training of artists and architects.

Modern distinctions between architecture and engineering do not readily apply to the work of architects throughout Greek and Roman history. In the design of buildings, architects’ roles and approaches changed over time. In the Classical period, Greek architects’ design specifications may have determined the forms of individual elements. According to an alternative view, the on-site nature of architects’ work may have coincided with a design process that overlapped with construction, in which masons contributed to design in a collaborative way. Beyond architects’ traditional responsibility for supplying full-scale plastic and graphic models, design by way of reduced-scale drawing was well established by the Hellenistic period. The Imperial era exploitation of Roman concrete gave architects a greater ability to project volumes through reduced-scale drawing.

Alongside career architects, amateur architects from the social elite oversaw projects in service to their communities or for their own leisure or use. In the Archaic period, architects of monumental Greek temples were responsible for the building phases and machines used in the construction process, with an increasing focus on formal design during the Classical period. Architects travelling in pursuit of commissions spread architectural ideas and influences throughout antiquity. Architects of Ionian works may have arrived in Italy as early as the Archaic period. In the Middle Republic, the presence of Greek architects in Roman environs is reflected in textual sources as well as in the use of Greek marble, building types, and spatial layouts. Similarly, the Roman architect Cossutius worked in Hellenistic contexts during this same period.

The social worlds of artisans and craftsmen were structured around skill on both conceptual and practical levels. On a conceptual level, artisans employed skill (τέχνη / ars) as a crucial component of the identities they constructed for themselves—identities that differed distinctly from perceptions of artisans among the elite, who dismissed most craftsmen as “base” manual labourers. On a practical level, the importance of apprenticeship as a tool for the acquisition of skill had a profound impact on the social profile of artisans and craftsmen: while it ensured that skill could be acquired by both free and enslaved artisans, it limited opportunities for women and for children born into households of low economic status. From an economic perspective, the small workshop remained the backbone of artisanal production. The ubiquity of small workshops in the economy can be explained best as the product of artisans’ efforts to respond to the risks created by product markets in which demand was inherently seasonal and uncertain. With some exceptions, artisans sought to mitigate their exposure to risk by minimizing fixed costs, while nevertheless preserving the ability to expand their output in periods of elevated demand. This was true even in industries that fostered specialization in discrete and technically demanding stages of a vertical production process: in these industries, artisans typically coordinated their production not within integrated firms, but rather within subcontracting networks.

Since antiquity Greek and Roman architecture has been subject to diverse and complex receptions. Architectural forms have experienced different and wide-scale transformations across space and time, both in antiquity and in postantique contexts. These adapted forms have emerged because of the complex interactions between building traditions and contemporary needs.

At a fundamental level, architecture must be functional. It must work for the purpose for which it was designed, be it a temple, law court, or residence. Vitruvius endorses this view in De Architectura (I.2.5), the only surviving architectural treatise from Greco-Roman antiquity. At the same time, architecture has a unique ability to concretise ideas. Not only were there political, religious, economic, social, and ideological concepts associated with specific types of ancient buildings, but the architectural forms of the classical world have had a powerful range of resonances that postantique architects, patrons, and regimes have been only too keen to exploit. Classical architectural forms come with a lot of baggage.