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The Pella Urban Dynamics Project focuses on the roles and experience of non-elites as their community emerged as a major centre of the Greek world. Pella is an ideal context for such an investigation: previous archaeological work shows that an older city here underwent a radical expansion during the second half of the fourth century BCE, following the city’s designation as capital of the Macedonian kingdom (ca. 400 BCE) and the subsequent expansion of Macedonian culture.

The Project seeks:

1. to make a methodological contribution to the study of the social dynamics of Hellenistic kingdoms

2. to examine some of the economic, social and cultural continuities and discontinuities in urban life between the Classical and Hellenistic periods

Extensive previous field work at Pella provides a chronological and spatial framework which are being tested and elaborated in the course of this Project. Previous research has revealed a Hellenistic district to the north of the original Classical city comprising various structures including a city wall, street grid, an exceptionally large agora (public square), sanctuaries, public baths, and several monumental elite houses, as well as parts of smaller dwellings and craft workshops. By contrast, although excavation and geophysics have identified and mapped the island stronghold of Phakos to the south (once surrounded by wetlands, and known from some literary descriptions), little information has been discovered about the adjacent Classical city. This project aims to explore and characterise the Classical and Hellenistic settlements as a basis for evaluating continuity and change. At the same time, the excavated Hellenistic structures will be contextualised within the broader topographic and chronological frame of the developing city. Urban change will be studied at multiple scales comprising both the community as a whole, as well as smaller spatial and social units: neighbourhoods and individual households.