This chapter and the one that follows shift from a focus on material culture to consider the long-term history of the island, and in particular, patterns of consistency and variation in the way its human communities have lived. Together, these two chapters provide a base for the broader social and economic commentary of Chapters 7 and 8. We will begin, perhaps slightly counter-intuitively, with the latest episode of human occupation on Antikythera, beginning in the late eighteenth century, and seek to use this better-documented phase as a clear point of comparison and contrast for the study of earlier periods that follows in Chapter 6. However, there is an obvious risk that the unusually detailed historical and ethnographic evidence available for the late eighteenth to twentieth centuries will lead to some gross methodological differences compared to earlier periods and make it very difficult to offer a valid diachronic analysis. In fact, almost every published archaeological survey reveals a sharp analytical discontinuity between the treatment of the most recent period of history and other phases, involving a shift to a very different kind of research and/or far more cursory treatment of recent surface artefacts. Not only does this kind of analytical exceptionalism skew our practical interpretations of landscape history, but it also reifies a misleading dichotomy — between what we construe as ‘modern’ versus ‘premodern’ — that is already far too pervasive in the social sciences. With these concerns in mind, the discussion that follows introduces a consistent approach for assessing the surface archaeological record across all chronological phases of human activity on the island.