The site was discovered by Andreas Lekatsas, then proprietor of the Stavros Hotel, in his vineyard, and excavated for the British School, at his generous invitation, in two campaigns in 1937 and 1938. It lies on a steeply sloping hillside just above the path leading up from the cave side of Polis Bay, and commands a splendid view down the Ithaca channel towards Same in Kephallenia (plate 1a). Its main area (christened TL), presumably a sizeable house, consisted of a ramp leading up to a heap of large roughly dressed stones, with one large loose rock in the middle; this suggested that the house had been destroyed by a fall of rock caused by an earthquake. On a terrace leading eastwards from the house were the remains of three small curvilinear huts, impinging upon one another, built of small stones; this area, L, was dug and planned by F. H. Stubbings. On a higher terrace beyond L we found some walls of a rectangular house with more regular stonework; this, House T, was dug and planned by H. Thomas.

It is more than twenty years since John Boardman with his ‘Pottery from Eretria’, published in Volume xlvii of this Annual, aroused a fresh interest in the study of Euboean pottery. A certain amount of work has been done on the subject since then, but there has been no controlled digging of cemeteries from which the main lines of the development of Euboean vase-painting in the sixth and fifth centuries can be established. So owing to the lack of external evidence, research on the subject continues to advance in a haphazard fashion and consists to a great extent in guesswork based on scanty material, as has recently been pointed out by Dietrich von Bothmer in his ‘Euboean Black-figure in New York’, the latest contribution to the subject. I wish here to add some more to the small corpus of vases already attributed, observing their relationship to the three great Eretrian amphorae in Athens and to one another.

This is the second of three articles presenting the settlement pottery of post-Minoan Knossos, found during the British School's excavations of 1951–61 mostly under the direction of Mr. Sinclair Hood. The Protogeometric and Geometric deposits were published in BSA lxvii (1972) 63–98; the final article in the series, to appear in a future volume of BSA, will be devoted to the Classical and Hellenistic material.

The South Stoa at the Argive Heraion is the best-preserved Peloponnesian stoa of the fifth century B.C., and one of the earliest anywhere with substantial remains of a stone entablature; it shows definite evidence of features which are rarely found elsewhere. The publication of it by Tilton at the beginning of this century certainly does not do justice either to the interest of its design or to the quality of its workmanship, and a complete republication of the existing remains would be well worth while. The present paper does not attempt to fulfil this need, however; it is directed instead to two interrelated features of the stoa which, it appears, were not fully understood by Tilton, the roof structure and the outer colonnade, and to a brief consideration of their significance.

This cist tomb was uncovered in 1959 during the excavation of the House of Sphinxes,2 and it lay at a distance of only 2 m. from tomb PG 606 (see fig. I and BSA li. 114 fig. 5).

It was built on the rock where there was a natural angle and a fairly sharp slope from west to east. The floor of the tomb was in fact for the most part the rock itself, but at the east end a number of small stones, overlying Mycenaean debris, were used. It was of rectangular shape, and orientated W.-E. The west and south walls of the tomb were provided by the rock; two large worked slabs, set upright, formed the north-east corner, and for the rest natural stones were used to line the tomb. There was no evidence of any roofing slabs, nor can one see how such could have been fixed. The inner dimensions were 1·78 × 0·68 m., and the two walling slabs had a height of 0·60 m.

In 1889 Petrie discovered and cleared a tomb at Kahun in the Fayum, Egypt. It contained a succession of burials in coffins and boxes which had not been disturbed after the final interment. Principally on the evidence of a large collection of beads, Petrie dated the use of the tomb to the Nineteenth-Twentieth Dynasties. This was queried by von Bissing, and after reconsidering the finds, Petrie decided that the tomb has been used during the reign of Tuthmosis III (1504– 1450 B.C.). Since then the tomb has usually been referred to as approximately or possibly of the reign of Tuthmosis III, and in his study of the sixteen Cypriote pots from the tomb Merrillees says there can be no doubt that all the interments were made during the reign ofthat pharaoh.

The aim of this paper is to establish as closely as possible the period of the use of the tomb, and to place in its context a small Mycenaean IIB squat jar, the only Aegean object found in the tomb.

In the winter months of A.D. 905–6 Arethas, Archbishop of Caesarea, unwillingly made the difficult journey from Constantinople to the Byzantine province of Hellas, central Greece. The official reason for this visit was to reconsecrate several churches which had been defiled and pillaged by raiders, probably Bulgars, but there was another reason why the vociferous archbishop should be removed from the capital. In September 905 Zoe, mistress of the Emperor Leo VI, had given birth to a child Constantine, Leo's first son and heir. While this event was joyfully celebrated by the entire court, it provoked dismay and alarm among ecclesiastics such as Arethas. For the emperor had already been married three times and to take a fourth wife was against the canons of the Orthodox Church.

We here conclude the series of reports on our journeys in the Dodecanese Islands. The work on Rhodes, begun by Mr. and Mrs. Lazenby and Hope Simpson in August 1968, was continued by Mr. and Mrs. Hope Simpson during the end of August and early September 1970. Hope Simpson also made a short visit to Chalki in September, and a longer visit to Astypalaia in October. As previously, our main objective has been to gauge the extent of prehistoric, and especially of Mycenaean, habitation in the Dodecanese. We have now visited all the main islands, for varying periods of time and with varying degrees of success. Much still remains to be done, and the results are subject to the usual limitations inherent in surface exploration. There was, for instance, no time to complete a full survey of the island of Rhodes, and our work there was more in the nature of a ‘reconnaissance in force’. It should be explained, however, that in addition to the usual obstacles of the terrain, the widespread Hellenistic and Roman settlements on Rhodes have evidently covered or obliterated most of the signs of earlier habitation on the same sites. On Astypalaia, for instance, conditions were much more favourable for eclectic surface search, and the measure of success was accordingly greater.

None of the inscriptions discussed here is as complete as one would like, but by the end I expect that the reader will consider the title justified. Whether he will be much the wiser is another matter, since questions are raised to which there are no ready answers. Modern graffiti (or dipinti?—I do not wish to argue terminology here) are often more explicit, though perhaps usually less deliberate.

The persistent absence of pendent concentric semicircles in the West is commonly regarded as surprising. MG skyphoi with this motif are among the earliest Greek types at Al Mina, and Boardman has suggested that ‘Euboean workshops may have stopped making them by the time Pithekoussai was founded’, though he later qualified this: ‘I think all it demonstrates is how very little we still know about early colonisation or precolonial days in Italy.’ The earliest imported type in Italy—all that is left of Blakeway's pre-colonial period of ‘trade before the flag’—is normally taken to be the Atticizing Euboeo-Cycladic MG II chevron skyphos, or ‘Cycladic cup’, long known from pre-Hellenic Cumae and joined recently by many examples from other native Iron Age cemeteries at Capua and Pontecagnano in Campania and at Veii in southern Etruria. In its turn, the chevron skyphos is so far absent from the oldest Western Greek colony, Pithekoussai, where the extensively imitated Corinthian LG ‘Aetos 666’ kotyle currently begins the sequence in the Valle San Montano cemetery, the Scarico Gosetti, and the Mazzola metal-working site.

In 1939, during road construction near the modern village Dimitra in the district of Gortynia in north-western Arcadia, digging works brought to light considerable prehistoric remains from the eastern slope of a small hill called Troupes (= ‘holes’) about 2 km. north-east of the village of Dimitra.

The excavations in the Citadel House area have produced a large number of Mycenaean terracotta figurines mostly in very fragmentary condition belonging to well-recognized classes already admirably examined by Mrs. E. French. Since the pottery found during this excavation is still under study, and the exact contexts of these figurines have not therefore definitely been determined, full publication of this material at this stage would do no more than multiply the number without adding significant information or leading to new conclusions. It will in due course be useful for statistical purposes to publish an account of the frequency of certain types in certain periods, when the associated pottery has been completely studied.

The study of Greek pottery of the Archaic period has reached the point at which most groups can be identified on stylistic grounds alone and confidently assigned to their place of manufacture, while in some groups works of individual studios, painters, and potters can be detected. There remain, however, both many problem pieces whose origin is disputed or unknown, and some major classes about which, for example, it is still possible to argue whether they were made in Italy or Greece. This is a field in which the techniques of clay analysis might prove beneficent, and this article presents the provisional results of the first of a series of tests designed to explore this potential.

In recent articles the present writer has used the evidence of brickstamps in proposing new dates for the walls of Thessaloniki, for the mosaics of the second phase of the Rotunda (now dedicated to St. George), and for the Byzantine palace. In each case, reference was made to only two or three examples, and it is with a view to reinforcing and developing the arguments already expressed that all the published fifth-century brickstamps recognizable as such are assembled here (with the addition of some unpublished examples).

A fine Roman portrait bust was found by chance at Knossos in July 1971, when a trench was being dug by a mechanical excavator in the field to the north of the Villa Ariadne, an area which probably formed part of the better residential quarter of Roman Knossos. It was discovered beneath a thick Roman concrete floor, which was visible in the side of the trench about 1 metre below the present-day ground level. It is now in the museum at Herakleion.

In this article, the second in the series dealing with pottery found in the Citadel House excavations at Mycenae, I shall describe the nature and contents of the destruction deposit found immediately outside the South House (Citadel House area) on the north. The mass of broken pottery which lay on the built stone causeway leading from the Ramp House upwards to the northern corner of the South House confirms the division into two periods of the Late Helladic IIIB pottery from the Argolid. I have described and illustrated this in detail and compared it with other groups of L.H. IIIB pottery which have been published from Mycenae and from Tiryns.

One might give as sub-title ‘Attic Marble: Science and Common Sense’. The names by which Greek marbles are usually known have been gravely questioned in recent years. In a very important article in the Annual for 1968, Mr. Colin Renfrew and Mr. J. Springer Peacey emphasized the need for more scientific research and further development of new methods before one could safely attach the common labels—‘Pentelic’, ‘Hymettan,’ ‘Parian,’ ‘Naxian,’ or ‘Island’. ‘Most of the attributions hitherto made’, they said, ‘and hence the various observations based on them, are not well founded’; and later, ‘If “Hymettan” merely means “finegrained grey”, and “Naxian” simply “coarse-grained white” there seems little point in using the geographic terms. Such a usage denies the hope that the origin of the various marble used for Greek sculpture may one day be better understood.’

Nearly ninety years ago students of Attic topography recorded the remains of an ancient house set on one of the southernmost ridges of the Hymettus range, a short distance below a cave sanctuary of Pan and not very far from the village of Vari in south-west Attica. The surface traces suggested an isolated country house, well planned and well built; it offered an instructive comparison with the Dema House near Ano Liosia in north-western Attica and this encouraged the excavators of the latter site to investigate further. Work on the southern site has now added another example, a noteworthy and fairly well-preserved example, to the short list of ancient Attic country houses known, explored, and published. For lack of a convenient topographical name we propose to call this site the Vari Cave House, or for brevity's sake in this report, the Vari House.