past horizons8 Above: Excavating on both sides of the northern defensive wall Right: A long and wide ramp discovered near the defensive wall of the acropolis Photographs by Eulah M. Matthews

9past horizons continued ? ? Bylazora Bylazora was the fabled capital city of the Paionians, the people who occupied the land of the ancient kingdom that was to become Macedonia. Many ancient Greek and Roman authors mentioned both the Paionians and their Bylazora. Homer portrayed the Paionians as the allies of the Trojans in the Trojan War, and Herodotus and Thucydides described Paionia and its gradual conquest by the Macedonians: the Paionians would regain their freedom and fortify their capital, Bylazora, only after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC. However, the days of Paionian independence were numbered. In the third and second centuries BC their lands were overrun by Gauls, Dardanians, Macedonians and, finally, the Romans. When Polybius, Livy, Strabo and Pausanias wrote of the Paionians, they told of a vanquished and vanished legendary people. And when Ptolemy composed his Geography in the second century AD, he noted the cities of Paionia, but Bylazora was not one of them, having long since been reduced to ruins. It is Bylazora that the Texas Foundation for Archaeological and Historical Research ( TFAHR) set out to explore in June 2008. The Last Redoubt of the Paionians by Eulah M. Matthews & William Neidinger