DgcityA team of Chinese archaeologists has completed its first field season at a ruined city in western Greece, the first joint excavation China has ever run on Greek soil. The project at Angelokastro, in the region of Aetolia, is studying urban life in the Hellenistic age that followed Alexander the Great.
The dig is led under the Chinese School of Classical Studies in Athens, set up in November 2024 as the first Asian research institute of its kind in Greece. Fieldwork opened in May this year, with Chinese and Greek specialists working side by side. In the two southern and northern trenches opened this season, they uncovered roads, building remains, courtyards and architectural elements, along with a substantial number of artefacts, all recorded with digital methods.
Angelokastro occupies a hilltop site above Aetolia’s coastal plain and is considered an important source for understanding how Hellenistic cities were laid out and how their inhabitants lived. The site has seen far less modern investigation than better-known cities of the period, which is part of its appeal to the joint team.
The two sides now plan a five-year programme combining geophysical survey, regional field survey and excavation to map the city’s plan and trace its development over time. This year’s trenches have closed, and work has moved indoors to sorting materials, conservation and multidisciplinary analysis. The progress was announced at the school’s annual conference in Athens on November 6. The project comes as Chinese teams increasingly take part in fieldwork around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, rather than only hosting foreign missions in China.
Greece is not the school’s only foreign portfolio. It also runs a joint excavation with Egyptian partners at the Montu temple in Luxor, opened in 2019, and Chinese institutes now have field projects stretching from Central Asia to East Africa. Angelokastro matters at home because the Hellenistic period, when Greek kingdoms stretched to the edges of India and exchange with Han China began, is a shared chapter; the school’s planners say digging it firsthand is as important to Chinese scholarship as bringing foreign teams to sites inside China.
