An Archaeology and History of Lyktos in Crete, Greece (ca. 1000 BCE–100 CE).

This lecture will take place in person at ISAW.

Registration is required at THIS LINK.

Since 2021, a team from ISAW/NYU has been involved in archaeological fieldwork at the Greek and Roman city Lyktos in central Crete, Greece. Celebrated by Homer, considered as the birthplace of god Zeus by Hesiod, and identified as the cradle of the Spartan constitution by Aristotle, Lyktos boasts an unusually rich literary and epigraphic record. The lecture offers an integrated analysis of this record and the wide-ranging archaeological discoveries made by ISAW/NYU’s team to shed light on Lyktos for roughly a millennium, i.e. from its probable foundation ca. 1000 BCE, to the monumentalization of part of its acropolis ca. 100 CE. Emphasis is placed on the rich finds from settlement and burial areas of the 7th to 5th centuries BCE, which generate exceptional insights into the archaeology and history of a Greek community of the period, and raise important methodological issues over the archaeological visibility of an alleged Dark Age.

Antonis Kotsonas is Associate Professor of Mediterranean History and Archaeology at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University. Previously he worked at other universities in the USA, the UK, Greece, and The Netherlands. Kotsonas holds a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh, an M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge, and a B.A. from the University of Crete. He has published six books and numerous articles on the material culture and socio-economic history of ancient Greece and the Mediterranean from the Early Iron Age to the Classical period, while his broader research interests extend from the Late Bronze Age to the Roman period and encompass the reception of antiquity. He has conducted fieldwork and finds research across the Aegean and comparative studies in Italy and Cyprus. Kotsonas is President of the New York Society of the Archaeological Institute of America, and is co-directing the Lyktos Archaeological Project in Crete.

 The lecture will be followed by a reception.

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