is a post-Minoan archaeological site, 16 km northwest of Agios Nikolaos. Known only by a chance remark of the 9th-century Byzantine grammarian Theognostus, archaeology of the site shows Dreros to have been initially colonised by mainland Greeks in the early Archaic Period about the same time as Lato and Prinias.
The early Iron Age site, first excavated in 1917, was most prosperous in the 8th–6th centuries BCE; later it became a minor satellite of Knossos and continued to be occupied into the Byzantine period. It comprises two acropoleis with an Archaic-period agora between them. Almost the whole of the city and its necropolis have been excavated, confirming that this is a post-Minoan Greek habitation; its inscriptions are in Dorian dialect. Traces of fortifications have been discovered.
