Professor Nicolas Coldstream was one of the world's leading Classical archaeologists, and a pianist of distinction. His chief field of interest was Greece in the early Iron Age, that is the centuries leading up to the full flowering of the Greek city state. From this central focus his work ranged throughout the Mediterranean. His clarity of thought, outstanding knowledge of his material, based on handling large quantities of it, and the humane spirit in which he wrote and taught guarantee an enduring legacy.

John Nicolas Coldstream was born in 1927. He was educated in Classics at Eton and King's College, Cambridge, and after National Service (the Buffs and Highland Light Infantry) he held appointments at Shrewsbury School and the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities of the British Museum, before beginning his academic career at the University of London.

He was first at Bedford College (1960-83), becoming Professor of Aegean Archaeology, and then at University College. There he was Yates Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology and subsequently an honorary Fellow. His courses and his always engaging teaching were treasured by many at all levels and successive generations of Greek and Cypriot postgraduates were inspired by him and his philhellenic sympathies at the start of their careers. Some of this affection was expressed in Klados (1995), a volume of studies in his honour edited by Christine Morris, with papers by no fewer than 26 former research students.

In 1957 Coldstream began his long association with the British School at Athens, eventually becoming chairman of its then managing committee and ultimately a vice-president. From this research base he studied the disciplined Greek pottery of the Geometric Period, that is the 10th to the early 7th centuries BC. He mastered all its local styles and their distribution, from the Near East to Sicily. Greek Geometric Pottery was published in 1968 and remains a large and irreplaceable masterwork. Fortunately he was able to complete a revised edition recently, incorporating abundant new discoveries.

His subsequent seminal book, Geometric Greece (1977), remains, in the words of a senior Greek scholar, unsurpassed by any other study of the period. This too has a revised, updated edition (2003). The richness of its engagement with the complex, multi-ethnic material culture of the Greek, eastern and central Mediterranean Iron Age worlds, based on acute observation, very wide knowledge and perceptive historical judgment, is precisely what enables new questions to be asked of the material.

Agency theory is currently fashionable in archaeology. Without such constructs Coldstream in fact always delighted in recovering ancient actions and choices of individual artists, potters and traders, Cretans, Euboeans, Cypriots and Phoenicians in particular, importing and exporting their wares. Thus, as Vassos Karageorghis has pointed out, his suggestion that Phoenician unguent manufacturers set up shop on Kos and Rhodes, commissioning locally made perfume bottles of Phoenician type for their trade. Again, at Knossos the extraordinary imagination and humour of particular Iron Age potters and painters was delightedly communicated. From all this Coldstream never eschewed moving to broad historical conclusions.

Two ancient sites stand out in his work. One is the island of Kythera. Here Coldstream and his friend Professor George Huxley excavated part of a Minoan (Cretan Bronze Age) settlement at Kastri, discovered in the 1930s by Sylvia Benton, of the British School. In the subsequent volume, Kythera. Excavations and Studies (1972), Coldstream was responsible for the Minoan pottery, which comprises much of the text. Countless studies of Minoan pottery, within Crete or on other Aegean islands, make reference to this work.

The second place is Knossos, where his heart lay. He published many fundamental papers and books on Knossian pottery, some of which he had himself excavated and all of which he had personally laid out and studied. The culmination was his co-editorship with H. W. Catling of the four volumes (1996) devoted to the publication, a magisterial work, of the large Iron Age cemetery excavated by the British School for the Greek authorities on the site of what was to become the medical faculty of the University of Crete near Knossos. The publication of Cretan pottery requires high-quality technical drawings, sometimes hundreds. Many of those in Coldstream's publications were done by his wife Nicola, the historian of medieval art. They had married in 1970 and Nicolas took as much delight in travelling for her studies as she in support of his work.

In recognition of his academic achievement Coldstream was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1964 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 1977. He was made a member of many foreign academies and an honorary Fellow of the Archaeological Society of Athens. In 2003 he was awarded the British Academy's prestigious Kenyon Medal for Classical Studies. On March 29 a planned day of papers and tributes in his honour in Athens went ahead as an in memoriam meeting.

As a person Nicolas Coldstream was a delight to know. Tall and dignified, wholly unpompous, modest and ever with a gentle twinkle or a good laugh, he was, in a recent Greek tribute (and Greeks know what they mean), the archetypal English gentleman.

Scores of scholars enjoyed the wonderfully generous hospitality and atmosphere he and his wife created in their London home after annual general meetings of the British School and on many another occasion.

Alongside Greece and its archaeology his other great love was music and opera. His tastes were catholic, from Handel through the Classical repertoire and on to Vaughan Williams. At University College he was a member of the music club, performing as a pianist in its concerts; at home too or in others' homes many were enraptured by his playing. It was singularly appropriate that the Coldstreams' house in Ebury Street should bear a plaque commemorating an earlier occupant, Mozart.

His is survived by his wife Nicola.

Professor Nicholas Coldstream, archaeologist, was born on March 30, 1927. He died on March 21, 2008, aged 80