How Agathe.gr Relates to the Athenian Agora Excavations

Agathe.gr is a digital research portal whose collections are built directly around the archaeological record of the Athenian Agora. Its publication series, object catalogues, and image archives all trace back to the excavations conducted in the Agora by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA). If you want to study Agora finds, read the official excavation reports, or search across objects, coins, and notebooks, this site is organized to serve exactly that purpose.

What the site actually contains

The homepage presents a filterable index of everything in the database. The counts shown give a clear picture of scale:

These are not generic archaeology collections. They are the working record of one excavation site — the Athenian Agora — digitized and made searchable. You can switch the view between list, icons, table, and map, and set results per page to 4, 8, 20, 40, or 100.

The publication series is the core link

The strongest evidence of the relationship is the Agora volume series, published by ASCSA, which appears throughout the site. Each volume is a formal excavation publication tied to Agora material:

• Agora I: Portrait Sculpture (Harrison, 1953) — catalogues 64 portrait heads, headless torsos, and fragments dating from the first half of the 1st century B.C. to the 5th century A.D.
• Agora II: Coins from the Roman through the Venetian Period (Thompson, 1954) — presents 37,000 of the 55,492 coins recovered during the 1931–1949 Agora excavations.
• Agora III: Literary and Epigraphical Testimonia (Wycherley, 1957) — gathers all ancient written references, literary and epigraphical, to the Agora and its monuments.
• Agora IV: Greek Lamps and Their Survivals (Howland, 1958) — builds a continuous lamp typology from the 7th century B.C. using chronological data from scientifically excavated "closed deposits."
• Agora V: Pottery of the Roman Period: Chronology (Robinson, 1959) — uses closed deposits from the 1st century B.C. to the early 7th century A.D. to establish relative and absolute pottery chronology.
• Agora VI: Terracottas and Plastic Lamps of the Roman Period (Grandjouan, 1961) — includes classification by type, a critical catalogue, dated contexts, and an excursus on theatrical material.
• Agora VII: Lamps of the Roman Period — continues the lamp series into the Roman era.

Each entry carries the author, publisher (ASCSA), a summary of contents, and the year of publication. This is how the site connects a search result to the excavation that produced it.

Why the excavation connection matters for research

The Agora volumes are not standalone books. They depend on excavation data — particularly the "closed deposits" mentioned in Agora IV and V. A closed deposit is a sealed archaeological context whose contents were deposited together, giving a reliable date range. That is why the site also indexes Deposits (1,765) and Notebooks (306) alongside publications: the notebooks are the excavators' original field records, and the deposits are the stratigraphic units those records describe.

So if you are reading about a lamp type in Agora IV, you can in principle trace it back through the deposit and notebook records that established its date. That chain — publication → deposit → notebook — is the structure the site is built to support.

How to use the site for Agora research

1. Start with the filter panel. Choose a category (Publications, Objects, Coins, etc.) to narrow 388,401 records down to what you need.
2. Search or browse the Agora series. If you want the official excavation reports, filter to Publications and look for titles beginning with "Agora."
3. Cross-reference with deposits and notebooks. For dating questions, check whether a publication cites a closed deposit, then look up that deposit or notebook record.
4. Use the map or table view when you need spatial or comparative context rather than a reading list.
5. Sign in if you need account features; the page shows a sign-in option and a feedback link for reporting problems.

What this means in practice

Agathe.gr is not a general archaeology website that happens to mention the Athenian Agora. It is a structured digital library of the Agora excavations themselves — the publications, the objects, the coins, the drawings, the field notebooks, and the deposits, all indexed together. If your question is about what was found in the Agora, when it dates to, or what ancient authors said about it, this is the entry point designed for that work.