"This is much more than a standard-issue guide.... While it most explicitly aims to give the general public new eyes by which they might understand what they see in the Greek landscape, it could also cause professional archaeologists and historians to rethink what they do."

—Susan Buck Sutton, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Indiana University and Purdue University at Indianapolis

Pylos is a natural harbor located on the southwestern coast of the Peloponnesian Peninsula of Greece. Homer's Odyssey describes "Sandy Pylos" as the seat of King Nestor, who welcomed Telemachos as he searched for his father, Odysseus, ten years after the Trojan War. Millennia later, modern Greece won its independence from Turkey there in the 1827 naval battle of Navarino.

This book traces the archaeological history of Pylos and surrounding regions in Messenia from the Stone Age to the present. Designed for general readers and travelers interested in ancient Greece, as well as scholars, it presents the findings of a consortium of archaeologists, natural scientists, historians, and art historians who joined forces to study the history of not just one archaeological site, but of an entire landscape, and not just in a single period, but at all times in the past.

This approach, based on understanding a whole regional system over an extended time from many disciplinary perspectives, represents the state-of-the-art in archaeological research. It clearly demonstrates how historical and archaeological evidence can be synthesized to offer richer insights into the past.