The site of Vathy on the island of Astypalaia, Greece, was strategically located along several maritime routes linking the prehistoric societies of the Aegean Sea. Recent excavations at Vathy have brought to light a site of major importance for our knowledge of Mediterranean cultures in the 4th- and 3rd-millennia BCE across a vast area, from Anatolia to Iberia. The megalithic walls of the settlement are densely engraved with petroglyphs that point to a Mediterranean artistic “koine,”a common visual language expressed in rock art. Moreover, coastal enclosures served to contain carefully arranged infant pot burials that are paralleled by similar ritual depositions in Anatolia, the Balkans and the Aegean. Finally, marble figurines found at the site connect Late Neolithic and Early Cycladic Aegean statuary with material from Anatolia and the Aegean islands and the broader Mediterranean world. In this lecture, recent finds from the excavations at Vathy will be discussed and will be placed in their Aegean context.

Andreas Vlachopoulos
Undergraduate and postgraduate studies in Archaeology at the National and Capodistrian University of Athens, specializing in Aegean Prehistory. His doctoral thesis (1995) negotiates the Late Mycenaean period on Naxos, for which research he received the Michael Ventris Memorial Award for Mycenaean Studies (1997).
Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Princeton (1998-1999) and Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (2001-2002).
His main research interests are the Mycenaean period in the Cyclades, the Aegean Early Bronze Age rock art and the Late Cycladic I wall-paintings of Thera. 
Director of the Vathy, Astypalaia Archaeological Field Project (Archaeological Society at Athens). Member of the Akrotiri Excavation, Thera, since 1989, and of the Pylos Region Excavations, since 1989.
Since 2009 he teaches Prehistoric Archaeology in the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of Ioannina, he has taught also at the universities of Athens (2006-2010) and of the Peloponnese (2004-2005), and has given lectures and seminars at universities in Europe, America and Canada.
He is the author of a two-volume monograph on Naxos and the Mycenaean Aegean in the Post-Palatial Period (2006, 2012) and of a new monograph (2023) on the Early Bronze Age site of Vathy, Astypalaia.
He is also the editor of two volumes on Aegean Prehistory (Painbrushes, 2018; Argonautes, 2003) and of five volumes on Greek Archaeology (Melissa Publishing House, Athens).

A light lunch will be served.