This book is an ethnography aimed primarily at archaeologists, but I hope it will also be of interest to cultural geographers and social and cultural anthropologists. Indeed, my original research on the peninsula of Methana in Greece, the focus of this study, was an ethnography, written up as my Ph.D. in cultural anthropology. Yet I never intended to be an anthropologist. I embarked on a British undergraduate degree in Archaeology and Anthropology having already had some experience of archaeology, in both the classroom and the field. My experiences as an undergraduate only confirmed my belief that archaeology was much to be preferred over social anthropology, which seemed to me at the time a way of turning the lives of real people into artificial conceptual categories, as often as not via arid exercises in kinship algebra.

My graduate studies in the United States in a Department of Anthropology in which archaeology was a sub-field, along with cultural and physical anthropology, initially left me with much the same views about anthropology and its practitioners. Here the situation was exacerbated by occasional disquisitions on why North American cultural anthropology was so much better than European social anthropology: the differences between the two versions seemed minor in comparison with the similarities. However, my views about anthropology changed when I met one of America's foremost cultural ecologists, Robert Netting. He showed me that some kinds of anthropology could remain firmly rooted on – indeed, in – the ground, in a pragmatic way that made sense.