Zagora, A Settlement. Andros of the GEOMETRIC By ALEXANDER PERIOD CAMBITOGLOU WITHTHECOLLABORATION OF J. M. BIRMINGHAM ANDJ. J. COULTON Plan of the excavatedarea and maps showing Andros and the promontoryof Zagora on which the settlementwas built with a fortification wall on the neck separating it from the rest of the island. Andros, the second largest island of the Cyclades, is comparatively unexplored. The first important finds from Zagora, a settlement on a rocky promontory of the west coast, were made at the end of the nineteenth century, when some Protogeometric and Geometric vases were found in an area believed to be that of the ancient cemetery. In more recent years the historian Demetrios P. Paschalis drew attention to the site, while Professor Nicolas Kontoleon of the University of Athens located the settlement itself when he was Ephor of Antiquities in the Cyclades. In I960 his successor,Dr. Nicolas Zapheiropoulos (in collaboration with Professor Kontoleon) carried out an excavation which showed that a town had flourished there during the Geometric period (ca. 900- ca. 700 b.c.). The settlement seems to have ended early in the seventh century and was never inhabited again. This abrupt end soon after the close of the Geometric period guaranteed the reasonably good preservation of a town site dating from the critically formative era that followed the dark years after the collapse of Mycenaeancivilization.