Zagora 3: A Geometric Town on the Island of Andros
Excavation Seasons of 1971, 1973 and 1974

Stavros Paspalas

The site of Zagora is situated on a peninsula on the southwest coast of the Aegean island of Andros. It is renowned for the extensive Early Iron Age settlement excavated there in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, J.N. Coldstream, a leading scholar of Greek Early Iron Age (EIA) archaeology, noted that “…no other place in the Greek world offers a clearer picture of domestic life during this period” (Coldstream 2003, p. 210). The current project is designed to publish the results of the last three excavations seasons (1971, 1973 and 1974), and to offer a new evaluation of the site in light of our increased knowledge of the EIA Aegean attained over the last forty years.

No other single excavated site in the Greek world can rival the insights offered into the social organization of a central Aegean settlement of the eighth century BCE, preserving as it does a sacred area, domestic architecture, storage provisions for agricultural produce and fortification works, undisturbed by later occupation.

The complete publication of the last three excavation seasons, and a synthesis of what was known heretofore of the site, will allow a deeper understanding of:

1. the strategies employed by the people of Zagora to exploit the possibilities offered by their environment;
2. the social make-up of this site as evinced by the settlement plan and any differential distribution of artifact categories;
3. the mutable circumstances of individual households as can be traced from changing house plans as well as by the assemblages excavated within them; and,
4. the nature of the inhabitants’ material world by an examination of such aspects as their architectural techniques and material assemblages.

Zagora has long been recognized both by archaeologists and historians as a key site in the study the Early Iron Age Aegean. Frequent use has been made of the excavation material published to date in reconstructions of life in eighth-century Greece and the social and political history of the era. It is not often noted, however, in these secondary studies that only a part, less than half, of the excavated material has been made known to the wider research community. The current project will complete the publication of the excavations of the 1970’s, and so make available the full archaeological record of the site. That this is an important desideratum is all the more evident given the increasing numbers of less-well preserved sites of the period that are being excavated in the wider region.