Before 2008, Laconia — the region of ancient Sparta — was a gap in the Mycenaean map. The great Bronze Age palace centers were known: Mycenae, Tiryns, Pylos, Thebes. Laconia had produced Mycenaean pottery and artifacts, but no palace. The discovery of a Linear B tablet at Agios Vasileios, a few kilometers east of the village of Xirokambi and about 10 km south of modern Sparti, suggested that the gap might simply be a gap in our knowledge. The Archaeological Society of Athens, under the direction of archaeologist Adamantia Vasilogamvrou, began systematic excavations in 2009 to find out what else was there.

The first tablet involved a large quantity of daggers — possibly short swords — recorded using the term "e-pi-zo-ta." A third tablet referred to textiles and woven fabric. These are exactly the kinds of records that Linear B was designed for: the meticulous accounting of a palace redistributive economy, tracking weapons and cloth moving in and out of a central administrative hub. In the 2012 season, more Linear B tablets emerged — along with a small Egyptian figurine, which speaks to the international connections a Mycenaean palace maintained. By the 2015 season, the excavated site area had grown to 3.5 hectares, with three distinct buildings (labeled A, B, and C) and an adjacent cemetery.

The finds accumulated season by season. Bronze swords. Pottery. Figurines. Fresco fragments in vivid colors, hinting at painted walls in the palatial style found elsewhere in the Mycenaean world. A bull's head rhyton — a ritual drinking vessel — pointed toward ceremonial activity. In Building A's courtyard, excavators found a cultic area dated to the Late Helladic IIIB2–C period, containing hearths, a feasting deposit, and an altar oriented northeast to southwest. The altar featured horns of consecration — the double-curved sacred symbol familiar from Minoan and Mycenaean religious contexts — along with large wheelmade bovid figures. Ritual feasting, weapons storage, textile accounting: this was a palace center in all the functional senses of the term.

Subsequent seasons revealed the larger architectural picture. A central courtyard, large in scale, with colonnaded porticos running along its sides. This is the signature layout of a Mycenaean palace — a type known from Pylos, Tiryns, and Mycenae, where the great central hall called the megaron served as the ceremonial and administrative core. The palace at Agios Vasileios is still being excavated; each season adds to the known extent of the complex. What is already clear is that Laconia, long assumed to be peripheral to the Mycenaean palace world, was home to a substantial regional center — one that controlled the Eurotas plain, maintained archives in Linear B, and participated in the wider trade networks of the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean.

Agios Vasileios sits at approximately 36.98°N, 22.48°E, about 10 km south of Sparti, west of the Eurotas River. The position is strategic: the hill commands the long Laconian plain, with sightlines down the valley and toward the Taygetus mountains to the west. From this hill, a Mycenaean palace administrator could have seen the agricultural land that fed the palace economy, the river road that connected it to the wider world, and the mountains that defined the territory's western edge. The Byzantine chapel of Saint Basil still stands near the excavation site — the medieval builder, as so often in Greece, chose the same prominent hilltop the Bronze Age builders had chosen three thousand years before.