The book begins by examining the history of the institutions within which archaeologists of Greece work, of the beliefs which guide them, and of their expectations about audiences. The second part of the book traces the history of equality in Iron Age Greece and its relationship to democracy, focusing on changing ideas about class, gender, ethnicity, and cosmology, as they were worked out through concerns with relationships to the past and the Near East. Ian Morris provides a new interpretation of the controversial site of Lefkandi, linking it to Greek mythology, and traces the emergence of radically new ideas of the free male citizen which made the Greek form of democracy a possibility.