With the closing down of the Curium expedition and the restriction of operations at Koúklia to study of the results of previous campaigns, it would have been a less active year had it not been for some increase in the scale of the operations of the Antiquities Department, notably at Salamis. I am indebted to all those named in this report for kindly communicating information concerning their excavations and research, and to Dr. P. Dikaios for particulars of Cyprus Museum acquisitions.

Following a ‘remarkable decade of fieldwork’ (Catherine Morgan in AR 59 [2012–2013] 1) and the increasing application of technologically advanced methods in archaeological investigations, emphasis appears now to have shifted from excavation to the analysis of the data collected. The present volume aims to strike a balance between articles that discuss exciting new discoveries (as is customary for the Newsround section and the Director's report of the work of the British School at Athens) and features that offer synthetic overviews on methodologies (Jill Hilditch, Jamieson C. Donati and Apostolos Sarris), specific regions (Chryssanthi Papadopoulou, Stavroula Sdrolia) or fields of study (Sylvian Fachard, Holger Baitinger). It will be clear from this description that I intend to continue the thematic organization Archaeology in Greece adopted several years ago in this edition, my first as editor.

The Early Helladic period on the Greek mainland is a time of complexity and innovation, characterized by a marked regionalism in settlement patterns and material culture, and the presence of myriad crossscale networks within which objects, technologies, ideas and individuals circulated. Nevertheless, much about the period remains unclear beyond the relative comfort of its long ‘middle’ phase, Early Helladic II (ca. 2950–2250 BC). Its emergence from the socio-cultural processes of the Final Neolithic, particularly, continues to be obscured by a ‘fourth-millennium gap’ which has proved frustratingly intransigent. Of those few Peloponnesian sites yielding radiocarbon dates which potentially fall within the fourth millennium, those of Franchthi (FCP 5.2, P-1659, ca. 4,230–3,790 cal. BC; see Vitelli 1999: table 9), Kouveleiki Caves A and B (ID1492; Kontaxi 2006) and Alepotrypa (Bronk-Ramsey et al. 2015: 200) fall well short of its mid-point. Halieis alone potentially bucks the trend (ca. 3,909–3,367 cal. BC; Pullen 2000: 184–86; see also Alram-Stern 2007), although the range on this sample is so great as to be problematic.