This article argues that a holistic approach to documenting and understanding the physical evidence for individual cities would enhance our ability to address major questions about urbanisation, urbanism, cultural identities and economic processes. At the same time we suggest that providing more comprehensive data-sets concerning Greek cities would represent an important contribution to cross-cultural studies of urban development and urbanism, which have often overlooked relevant evidence from Classical Greece. As an example of the approach we are advocating, we offer detailed discussion of data from the Archaic and Classical city of Olynthos, in the Halkidiki. Six seasons of fieldwork here by the Olynthos Project, together with legacy data from earlier projects by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and by the Greek Archaeological Service, combine to make this one of the best-documented urban centres surviving from the Greek world. We suggest that the material from the site offers the potential to build up a detailed ‘urban profile’, consisting of an overview of the early development of the community as well as an in-depth picture of the organisation of the Classical settlement. Some aspects of the urban infrastructure can also be quantified, allowing a new assessment of (for example) its demography. This article offers a sample of the kinds of data available and the sorts of questions that can be addressed in constructing such a profile, based on a brief summary of the interim results of fieldwork and data analysis carried out by the Olynthos Project, with a focus on research undertaken during the 2017, 2018 and 2019 seasons.

Research on the cities of the Classical Greek world has traditionally focused on mapping the organisation of urban space and studying major civic or religious buildings. More recently, newer techniques such as field survey and geophysical survey have facilitated exploration of the extent and character of larger areas within urban settlements, raising questions about economic processes. At the same time, detailed analysis of residential buildings has also supported a change of emphasis towards understanding some of the functional and social aspects of the built environment as well as purely formal ones. This article argues for the advantages of analysing Greek cities using a multidisciplinary, multi-scalar framework which encompasses all of these various approaches and adds to them other analytical techniques (particularly micro-archaeology). We suggest that this strategy can lead towards a more holistic view of a city, not only as a physical place, but also as a dynamic community, revealing its origins, development and patterns of social and economic activity. Our argument is made with reference to the research design, methodology and results of the first three seasons of fieldwork at the city of Olynthos, carried out by the Olynthos Project.

Does Archaeology in Greece have a purpose? Is it more than a convenient way of logging fortuitous finds? From a newcomer's viewpoint, AG may look hard to put into focus. Why does new information about landscapes and material culture matter? After all, don't we already know a great deal about the remote past of Greece? Aren't museums already full of attractive and interesting things? Do we need more of the same?

Sometimes it pays to play devil's advocate: to stand back, observe what is going on and to take stock. If we want to have a short answer to the above questions, we need go no further than the Newsround section of AG. This year, David Smith bookends the section with key developments that have at least regional, arguably global significance. At one end, we have new data on the presence of early hominids in the Aegean and, at the other end, the report of a 16th -century Spanish galleon from the era of Philip II and the first evidence of a Minoan shipwreck across the Aegean from Crete itself.

Discussions of method, of the different ways in which we may try and answer research questions, are perhaps rarer in the historiography of ancient Greece than discussions of theory. Theory has, quite rightly, played a significant role in historiography, but the comparative unimportance of method is rather mysterious. Methods are central to archaeology because a researcher has to make choices, from the very start of a project, about which methods will be the most appropriate for delivering answers to the chosen research questions. The archaeological journal Antiquity has a special section on Method. The content of that section may seem to be rather more technical than the kinds of methods I want to consider here. Nevertheless, all discussions of method, or methodology, help to give substance to theory; they help us to make clearer the connections between evidence and theory. Stewart's paper, in this issue of AG, offers a series of reflections on the values and limitations of survey methods. Archaeologists are conscious of the fact that different methods produce different results. This can sometimes be perplexing for historians, as I discuss further below. Method refers not just to the ways in which we go about a particular research project. It also applies to the broad perspectives within which we do research. Catherine Morgan's report on the work of the BSA in 2013–2014 draws together the many new strands that are connecting people and places of the past, but also contemporary preoccupations with environments, societies and their habits in the recent past.

The three most recent issues of Archaeology in Greece have looked at the preliminary data that has been published on the ‘remarkable decade’ of discoveries from all over Greece spanning the Athens Olympics of 2004. As this material has begun to be absorbed in summary form, and has been made available to readers via AGOnline, the range of chapters included in this issue of AG, which covers reports made available in 2013–2014, turns in a more consciously thematic direction.

This change of emphasis has also been enabled by a redesign of the format and style of AG. Our aim is to make the content more accessible, as well as easier to absorb. We hope that it will be more attractive, too. The Newsround section is an innovation intended to provide readers with a quick survey of important developments that are not otherwise referred to in other chapters of this year's copy. In her View from Greece, Catherine Morgan refers to a number of recent developments that we hope to cover in future editions of AG. These include conference reports and other publications on the Ionian and Aegean islands, and on the countryside of Attica. As contributors to AG, we hope that the selection of news items, alongside the thematic and regional reports, will give readers a clear idea of the range of new developments in Greek archaeological field research.

Macedonia continues to offer a great deal of new material evidence, including much systematic information, as well as major, occasionally sensational discoveries (see Catherine Morgan's “View from Greece”, above), whether in those areas that are considered to be the historical “heartlands” of the Argead kingdom, Pieria and Emathia, the mountain regions of the northern and western Pindus or in eastern Macedonia, which comprises areas with a rather different historical and cultural profile. The administrative area of Thrace has, by contrast, played a more modest role in recent field research, except for a limited number of key sites and occasional finds resulting from development work along the route of the new Egnatia Odos. The “remarkable decade” preceding and following the Athens Olympics of 2004 has played out differently in northern Greece, where the proliferation of archaeological investigations has been driven largely by development work in and around Thessaloniki (and, to a lesser extent, Edessa and Veroia), particularly along routes connected to the national highway and the network of underground shafts and tunnels associated with the construction of Thessaloniki's metro line and stations along its axis.

A wealth of data, providing both nuanced understanding and occasionally ‘white noise’

Last year I referred to the ‘remarkable decade’ of archaeological investigation, the decade following the turn of the millennium, when Greece as a nation, and the city of Athens and Attica at large, prepared for the 2004 Olympic Games; when cities and countryside benefited in a variety of ways from the cumulative cultural investment of European Union, philanthropic and commercial funding to expand the scope of the country's heritage. New sites were investigated and new museums opened their doors, with a host of conservators and designers deployed to support them. That was before the economic downturn of 2008 and the consequent contraction of fieldwork, of professional and technical staff, and of research services in general.

The fruits of the ‘remarkable decade’ are nevertheless continuing to appear in books and journals. Robert Pitt provided the first glimpse of these developments in his report on Athens and Attica (AR 57 [2010–2011] 31–48), drawing on the first fascicule of volumes 56–59 [2001–2004] of ADelt, to which archaeologists are required to report their work in the year in which it took place. ADelt is a necessarily cumbersome and slow publication, whose future is uncertain, as Cathy Morgan explained in her introduction to AG 2009–2010 (AR 56 [2009–2010] 1). The complexity of the process of collating, editing, and publishing archaeological work, of all periods, in a single book seems even less viable today as government budgets have become tightly constrained.

This edition of Archaeology in Greece is dedicated to the memory of Hector Catling, Director of the British School at Athens from 1971 until his retirement in 1989. Many tributes have been paid to Dr Catling's distinguished career of academic and personal service. Archaeology in Greece, however, owes a particular debt to him as one of its outstanding editors. Not only did Hector Catling compile the supplement almost single-handedly throughout his directorship of the School, but his research also contributed richly to it, notably via his major excavations at Knossos (for example in the North Cemetery) and in Lakonia at the Menelaion and the Sanctuary of Zeus Messapeus at Tsakona. Archaeology in Greece remains one of his lasting contributions to the scholarly community.

In June 2013 we also mourned the passing of two close colleagues, Spyridon Iakovides, Academician and distinguished excavator of Mycenae (where he remained active to the very end of his life), and Elisavet Stasinopoulou, formerly Keeper of Vases and Minor Arts at the National Museum in Athens. In July 2013 we were saddened by the untimely death of Polyxeni Bouyia, expert on central Greece and, as Keeper of the Bronze Collection at the National Museum, a key collaborator in the outstandingly successful Antikythera exhibition. And as we went to press, we received news of the death of George Hourmouziadis, Professor Emeritus of prehistoric archaeology in the Aristotle University, Thessaloniki.

The selection of sites below reflects some of the most distinctive additions of 2012, arranged according to a number of themes, which reflect a dominant and continuing interest in sites that illuminate the urban and civic characteristics of archaeological locations in mainland Greece.

Among the important discoveries of 2012 was the prehistoric stone pile and chamber tomb cut into bedrock at the Early Helladic cemetery of Asteria (ID3306), near Glyphada, Attica, which is discussed by David Smith below. The tomb was repeatedly reused: it contained one strongly contracted skeleton in front of the door and a pile of bones in the east half of the chamber representing at least 20 individuals (17 adults and three children). M. Pantelidou Gofa (ASA) reports on the 2012 season at Tsepi, Marathon, where a new deposit was investigated outside tomb 39, as well as two new tombs, 56 and 58 (ID3311), noting that Tomb 56 has all the known characteristics of the Tsepi tombs: rectangular with a built chamber, walls and threshold.

In the Athenian Agora, investigations continued in 2012 of the Hellenistic and Classical road levels of the Panathenaic Way. John Camp reports the following on behalf of the ASCSA (ID2893, cf. ID2471).

Strabo, who visited the island of Gyaros in 31 BC, described it as a village (kōmion, κώμιον Strabo 10.5.3) inhabited by fishermen. This comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with the Aegean islands today. Modern photographic promotions give local fish specialities, and the modest, traditionally whitewashed homes of the fishermen responsible for fresh catches, plenty of colourful emphasis. Not all the fish on offer in the islands are locally caught today, and many visitors arrive by air, rather than by boat, following one of the principal maritime itineraries (which do not, as it happens, normally include Gyaros).

More surprising, perhaps, is the fact that Strabo refers to Gyaros at all. This little island, no more than 17km2 and thus never big enough to provide much of a land-based way of life, even for a small community, lies midway, as the crow flies, between Kea to the west, Kythnos to the southwest and Syros to the south, and is flanked to the northeast by the long chain of islands which in effect extend the mountains of Euboea southeastwards into the heart of the Aegean — Andros, Tenos and Mykonos (map of the Cyclades). The geographer was simply articulating a memorable anecdote, according to which the Gyarians sent their own ambassador to Octavian in the hope of getting a reduction of the 150 dr tribute that had been laid on the inhabitants' reluctant shoulders. The Gyarians were not quite as inconspicuous as they wanted to appear in the eyes of Octavian, or as miserable as they looked to Strabo.