T. Leslie Shear Jr. (known as “Bucky”) has spent his life between Princeton and Athens, Greece, where he was born on May 1, 1938. He received his B.A. summa cum laude from Princeton’s Department of Classics and his Ph.D. from the Department of Art and Archaeology in 1966. He began his academic career as an instructor and then an assistant professor of Greek and Latin at Bryn Mawr College, returning to Princeton in 1967. In 1968, he became field director of the American excavations in the Agora of Athens under the aegis of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, a position he held until 1994. During his tenure, the excavations were greatly extended to the north, beyond the Piraeus railway line. These were rewarded with the discovery in 1981 of at least the corner of the famed Stoa Poikile, or Painted Stoa, built in the third quarter of the fifth century B.C. and painted by the greatest artists of the day.

Bucky’s dissertation was titled “Studies in the Early Projects of the Periklean Program.” Although never published, it is probably one of the most widely used documents by archaeologists and historians who seek to disentangle the complex history of the Athenian Acropolis under the great Athenian statesman.

Although much of his career has been spent on the excavation and the publication of the monuments of Athens, Bucky began his archaeological career at the Bronze Age site of Mycenae and then worked at Eleusis and Perati in Attica, at Corinth, and later at Morgantina in Sicily. His connection to Mycenae lasted many years and was cemented by his marriage to Ione Mylonas in 1959, the daughter of George Mylonas, who served for many years as director of the excavations. Bucky has regularly taught both undergraduate and graduate courses on various aspects of the Greek Bronze Age.