The Ancient Methone Archaeological Project

Ancient Methone (Pieria) was a major port and industrial center in northern Greece from the first millennium B.C. until Philip II of Macedon destroyed the city in 354 B.C., and in the process lost his right eye. Excavations at the site since 2003 have unearthed Bronze Age burials, important Early Iron Age deposits and inscriptions and direct evidence of the Macedonian siege, destruction, and aftermath, thereby extending the history of the settlement from the Late Neolithic period past the fourth century B.C. In 2012 an international team from UCLA joined the Ephorate of Antiquities of Pieria to study and publish these discoveries, and as the Ancient Methone Archaeological Project, launched a fresh phase of multidisciplinary fieldwork from 2014 to 2017, the results of which are presented here.

Professor John K Papadopoulos has excavated widely in Australia, both on Aboriginal and historic sites, and in Greece, Italy and Albania. He has been a member of the excavation team at Torone in northern Greece since 1979 and field director of the excavations, as well as the geophysical and underwater surveys, from 1986 to 1995. He was co-director of the UCLA-Institute of Archaeology at Tirana excavations at the pre- and protohistoric burial tumulus of Lofkënd in Albania, and is currently working, with Greek and American colleagues, at the site of Methone in Pieria, north Greece. He is also currently working on a two-volume publication of the Early Iron Age material from the Athenian Agora, the first of which will appear as Agora XXXVI.