The ‘On-Site Museum’ of the Metropolis was created in 1999. The first of its kind in Greece, and one of only a few known internationally, it allows visitors to walk among the ancient remains, just as they were found during excavation. Those here are from the Mycenaean city of the last centuries of the second BC millennium. Part of a brick wall was preserved on its stone platform. Inside, rooms of a pottery workshop were revealed: benches on which still unfired pots were resting, basins for painting the latter with a kaolin slip, a kiln for their firing, near to which one of the largest known Mycenaean craters was found (copies are on display now). This is one of but a few (and maybe the best preserved) workshop complexes from the Late Bronze Age in the Aegean. The furnishings and finds provided much information about the artisanal infrastructure of the settlement and about the extensive network of contacts Naxos had with mainland Greece, Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean during the 12th and 11th centuries BC. The discovery of the ceramic workshop makes Naxos the only place where a production centre for figurative and other luxury vases of the 12th century has been excavated.
Another particularly important find is the earthen mound of the Geometric period, which was the focus probably of hero worship made at the burial-place of ‘the ancestors’. In the 2nd century AD, houses were erected, the remains of which can be admired by visitors.
