Humour, just like Proteus, can take on many shapes, jumping erratically from one form intoanother, from parody into caricature, from puns into situation comedy. But if one struggles with itlong enough, it will in the end, as Proteus did, deliver some truths and sometimes even insightsinto the human psyche. Most anthropologists and historians know that a writer, or indeed anyone whochooses to mock something or someone, reveals more about himself than about the object of hismockery. The visual jokes tell us something about rules of behaviour, about the differences betweenthe public and the private sphere, about gender differences, ethnicity, politics, beauty anddeformity, buying patterns, fashion, perceptions of religion and myth. It often tells us what peoplereally thought and experienced. This book fits in the framework of the ‘rediscovered’cultural historical trend in archaeology. Current theory is in its post-processual stage, where formany archaeologists, like Ian Morris, ‘Archaeology is cultural history or it isnothing’. Classical archaeologists have often been at odds with the radical theoreticalchanges in archaeology because of the vast amount of literary and epigraphic evidence available tous, and utterly absent from other forms of archaeology, which have had to formulate new theoreticalmodels to tackle their lack of other forms of evidence than archaeological. Numerous scholars havediscussed these prickly issues, and some, such as Shanks, have even tried in recent years to puttogether a ‘social archaeology’ adapted from its prehistoric model to classicalarchaeology. It is an exciting stage in theoretical archaeology, and I for one am glad that we areback in the world of cultural history with a better anthropological grip on who we are to betterunderstand what we observe.