Ione Mylonas Shear

Ione Mylonas Shear (née Mylonas; February 19, 1936 – January 15, 2005) was an American archaeologist who specialized in the domestic spaces of Mycenaean Greece. She was the daughter of George E. Mylonas, a Greek-born archaeologist teaching in the United States. Ione Mylonas was educated at Wellesley College and undertook graduate study in archaeology at Bryn Mawr College and at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA). She excavated under her father at Eleusis, at Isthmia in central Greece, and at Morgantina on Sicily. At Eleusis, she met the archaeologist T. Leslie Shear, Jr., whom she married in 1959.

Shear's publications included works on ancient Greek art and the Acropolis of Athens in addition to her primary field of Mycenaean archaeology. She published three monographs, including two in which she argued that the Homeric poems (the Iliad and Odyssey) were accurate reflections of the world of Bronze Age Greece. These beliefs, which she shared with her father, were generally rejected as outdated.