which justified every superlative adjective that historians, ancient and
modern, had heaped upon the economic success of the kingdom’s
Argead kings. The peak of Andronikos’s career coincided with a new
era of communications media, which he was quick to exploit in the
promotion of his academic and cultural objectives. His aptitude for
communication explains both the epithets that he was given—shaman
and showman.^65 The shamanistic qualities have been connected with his
initiation of a new debate in Greece about the cultural role of Macedo-
nia’s early royal dynasties, both in antiquity and in terms of contempor-
ary heritage.^66
Much of the intense discussion of Andronikos’s discoveries in the
Greek press, and the wider controversies about Macedonia’s Greek
heritage discussed in Hamilakis’s biographical chapter on Andronikos
have by-passed international audiences. The scientific importance of
Andronikos’s research was masked, during his lifetime, by the sensation-
alist tendencies of his media appearances. Beneath the cloud of contro-
versy was a serious programme of investigation. This began with Manolis’s
first excavations in the royal palace at Vergina under K. A. Rhomaios in
1952, and continued there during the 1960s, in association with Giorgios
Bakalakis, after a scholarship to Oxford. Andronikos’sfirst substantial
monograph was on the Early Iron Age burials in the vicinity of the palace,
published in 1969. A series of inhumations, belonging to men and
women, provided thefirst systematic evidence of the inhabitants of the
landscapefirst mapped by Léon Heuzey almost a century earlier. They
revealed a population of men imbued with martial aspirations. Their
burials contained a plethora of iron weapons, among the earliest iron
objects identified in the region, bronzefittings and ornaments (a metal
well-represented in the women’s burials too), and a range of other
materials, including ivory and amber, the precious stone that played
such a key role in Sherratt’s intercontinental configurations.
Although he was also involved in excavation at other Macedonian
locations, including Verroia, Dion, Kilkis, and the Chalkidic peninsula,
the principal focus of Andronikos’s later excavations was the palace and
the royal burials in the‘Great Tumulus’at Vergina. As the wealth of
individual artefacts has emerged from laboratory conservation and
museum catalogues, the nature of Macedonian élite lifestyles has become
increasingly apparent. Military equipment, some of it of exceptional
design, was certainly present, but the overall tenor of mortuary practice,
(^65) Hamilakis 2007, 125–68.
(^66) Hamilakis 2007; Lane-Fox devotes the introductory chapter to his edited volume on
Macedonia entirely to the chronology of the royal tombs at Vergina (Lane-Fox 2011).
Introduction 33