The Art of Antiquity

The archives of the American School excavations in the Athenian Agora contain a remarkable series of watercolors and drawings (well over 400) by Piet de Jong, one of the best-known, most distinctive, and influential archaeological illustrators of the 20th century. They show landscapes, people, and, above all, objects recovered during many seasons of fieldwork at one of the longest continuously running archaeological projects in Greece. This volume brings these illustrations out of the storage drawers and assembles in color a representative sample of some of the finest of Piet de Jong’s contributions. Along the way, the book tells the story of the Agora excavations and assesses their contribution to scholarship. It includes essays by 15 scholars currently working at the Agora, and surveys the entire span of the material they are studying, from Neolithic pottery to the Late Byzantine and post-Byzantine frescoes from the Church of Ayios Spyridon.

John K. Papadopoulos is a Professor in the Department of Classics and the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA.