This study uses the collection of fifteenth- to twentieth-century travel literature from the BSA library to consider issues of (elite) mobility in the Aegean Sea. These texts contain a wealth of information on the routes chosen by travellers between various islands and mainland ports, and on the navigability of the Aegean basin. By using a combination of computational Proximal Point Analysis and Social Network Analysis, these routes are visualised, and discussion focuses on how navigation varied both between centuries and according to the traveller's place of origin. It is suggested that travellers were dependent on other sorts of networks, and that routes travelled were shaped greatly by the economics and politics of the day. It is also proposed that methodologies used in this paper offer great potential for engaging broad-scale sets of archive data.

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.

Reconstructing moments in ancient history is done most effectively when we draw together different types of evidence. Particularly given the fragmentary and random shape of our datasets, many scholars would agree that it is important to combine material – and sometimes patterns only become visible when we do so in new and experimental ways. As scholarship on ancient Greek religion has become increasingly interdisciplinary in recent years, many scholars have brought together datasets long studied separately – the material evidence by archaeologists and anthropologists, and the texts by philologists and philosophers – now is a prime-time to crosspollenate different types of evidence on a much broader scale. This paper proposes that by bringing together types of evidence that might usually be kept apart and by applying new methodologies, we can shed further light on certain ancient socio-cultural phenomena.

The BSA Museum houses a study collection of artefacts donated to the BSA and collected by its members up to the 1960s. The collection provides a valuable resource for teaching and research, enabling scholars to gain first-hand familiarity with objects from a range of material types (including ceramics, metals, stone, terracotta) dating from the Neolithic through to the Late Byzantine period. The collection comprises some 4,000 individual artefacts and over 46,000 sherds of pottery, objects that have been displayed in different parts of the BSA premises over the past 130 years. Of the whole collection, various small sections have been published in the Annual of the BSA. What has been lacking, however, is a narrative about the museum itself: where its objects came from, who studied them, how the collection as a whole has been catalogued and organized. This paper tells that story: from the collection’s humble beginnings, with the first donation of just a few sherds in 1892, through to recently completed digitization and public engagement projects.

This article is a case study in doing new things with old data. In 1953 Lord William Taylour directed the excavation of a monumental vaulted tholos tomb known as 'Tholos IV' at the site of ancient Pylos, Messenia, Greece. The excavation was conducted over two months, during which detailed notes were recorded in three notebooks now kept in the Archives of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. The formal publication of Tholos IV, however, contains only a basic narrative of the excavation, offering neither precise detail on stratigraphy, object find spots, nor even a complete inventory of small finds. The present study goes back to the original notebooks kept by Taylour and combines the data contained in them with a new digital survey of Tholos IV to produce a comprehensive and accurate 3D GIS model for the excavation. Furthermore, the GIS has been produced in such a way that its dataset is compatible with new excavation data currently generated in the ongoing Palace of Nestor Excavations (PONEX) project, bringing together two excavation campaigns conducted under very different circumstances, methodologies, and recording protocols. Discussion follows on how the production of this GIS deepens our understanding not just of the legacy excavation, but also of the site and its wider landscape.