This contribution offers a brief survey of funerary archaeology undertaken in the central and southern Aegean over the course of the last 25 years. Major construction projects and salvage and systematic excavations have brought to light some 1,700 new Late Bronze Age tombs (i.e. 27% of the extant corpus). Despite these discoveries, however, very few tombs have received a final publication and few of these projects are context driven. New data are and will continue to be desirable – but it is the quality of the recording of these data, our research questions and the careful application of new methodologies, during and after excavation, that will open up new interpretative avenues and debates. With the number of secure archaeological contexts dwindling fast, not least because of the constant threat of looting, developing new approaches (for example understanding site formation and episodes of use) is crucial if we are to recover as much as possible and advance our knowledge of the multivalent roles played by burials within ancient societies.

This paper explores important new evidence from recent and ongoing landscape and excavation projects carried out in Thessaly that revolutionizes our understanding of the Neolithic in the region. Moving from wider landscapes to individual archaeological sites, the paper focuses on complexity and diversity in the spatio-temporal manifestation and internal structure of Neolithic settlements, and highlights the potential of the current direction of research to illuminate the lifeways of the Neolithic people of Thessaly.

This article reviews a decade of publications and rescue excavations on the islands of Aegina, Poros and Salamis, and on the island-like Methana peninsula. Considerable amounts of new data have come to light that demonstrate how, from prehistory through to more recent times, the islands of the Saronic Gulf have been plugged in to networks with one another, with their neighbouring mainlands and with the wider Aegean. Moreover, a not insignificant number of publications has recently become available that synthesize many years of archaeological discoveries into cultural histories, telling the stories of each island and of the whole archipelago.

This paper discusses material culture in western Thessaly from the eight to the fifth century BC. The focus of the paper is on the recently investigated settlement at Philia, where a number of apsidal buildings have been unearthed, dating to the sixth and fifth centuries BC; their layout and organization reveal central planning. Comparison of the architecture and contents of the Philia houses to those from other Thessalian sites reveals the existence of shared traditions in the region, in terms of both the architecture (apsidal buildings) and pottery (grey wares), with a long history from the ninth to the fifth century BC.