The delay in the publication of this report is due to World War II, and therefore requires no apology from us. A few drawings, notes and photographs were lost or mislaid during the evacuation of April 1941, and have not yet been traced. Post-war conditions have made it impossible to revisit Siphnos, where the great majority of the finds were stored. Such a visit, however, might not have availed us much, since, according to an official report received by the Ministry of Education during the occupation, the officer in command of the Italian garrison took all the objects of value into his own custody, on the ground that they were insecurely housed. As this officer appropriated the catalogue also, the persons making the report were unable to say which of the finds had been removed; but it is believed that the two important seventh-century figurines in vase technique (Pls. 6–8) are among those missing.

The representations of ships on Geometric vases, especially on Attic funerary vases of the Dipylon class, frequently earn a passing and often misleading mention in articles on ship-construction or on the relation between heroic saga and scenes on monuments of the Geometric period. The authorities most frequently quoted on the Geometric ship are now out-of-date in that they were able to treat only a fraction of the material now available; although there is still much valuable matter to be found in them, especially in the articles of Pernice, Assmann, and Torr. The original publication of many of the documents, especially those discovered in the first (1871) Dipylon dig, was extremely haphazard; some fragments were published twice over in different forms.

Distribution maps are fashionable among archaeologists, but they are not always used properly. It is not enough to mark the places where objects of a given class have been found; it is important to know also in what frequency they were found, where they have not been found, and where they have not been looked for. To collect this information is often difficult and sometimes impossible since so much excavation has gone unrecorded, and I have therefore chosen one of the easier subjects, the distribution of Chiot pottery in the late seventh and early sixth centuries B.C. Much Chiot pottery is fortunately distinctive, so that even the more conscienceless excavators have often identified it and thought it worth mention, and thus we have fuller data for its distribution than for that of most classes of archaic Greek pottery.

The work of publishing the Corinthian pottery from the sanctuary of Hera Limenia at Perachora has suggested the present attempt to offer a few observations on the styles represented in the Corinthian animal-frieze ware and to discuss the chronology of Corinthian pottery in general. There is here no suggestion that Necrocorinthia is out-of-date and superseded. If it were, it would be beyond the powers of the present writer to supply the deficiency. Fortunately it seems clearly established that Payne's broad divisions of style and much of his detail stand unshaken by the addition of fresh material to the corpus of Corinthian pottery. There is, however, a continually developing prospect of further division and subdivision of styles and a greater understanding of the interrelation of these.

Under the same title M. M. Vasić published an article forty years ago, which was then the first step towards a systematic study of the connections between the Aegean area and the Serbian and North Balkan spheres. M. Vasić's article was the first result of the first systematic researches at Vinča, the most important site of the Northern Balkans. From this time on many excavations have been made at Vinč and other prehistoric sites, and the material has piled up too rapidly for scientific evaluation to cope with. As the past forty years, ending with World War II and the subsequent events in Yugoslavia, must no doubt be reckoned an entire phase in the history of this study, it seems appropriate now to attempt to give a summary of the results so far gained.

When I wrote my report on the excavation of Polis, Ithaca, the leader of the expedition had suggested that in Ithaca, Early Bronze Age pottery had persisted till the closing phases of the Late Bronze Age, which meant that Ithaca was a backward little place well away from the broad stream of contemporary culture. I thought it possible that there was another lag after the Late Bronze Age, and I called certain vases ‘Mycenaean,’ taking fabric to be the determining factor. My paper was written in 1932, but not published till 1942, and long before then I was sure that we were both wrong. Mr. Heurtley wished to account for the presence of fifty Mycenaean sherds in an Early Bronze Age Settlement at Pilikata. It is true that no Middle Bronze Age settlement has yet been found in Ithaca. That may be our bad fortune, or the island may have been uninhabited in the centuries before 1500 B.C., as it was in the sixteenth century A.D. It seems simpler to admit disturbance by any later diggers of foundations or seekers of wells, than to postulate an iron curtain between Ithaca and both its nearest neighbours, Kephallenia and Leukas, in the Middle Bronze Age. After all, Early, Middle, and Late Bronze Age sherds were found together in Area VI at Pilikata, and no house plans have resulted; some disturbance seems inevitable.

People who walk in mountains grow accustomed to finding their movements facilitated from time to time by what the mountaineering books call ‘corridors’ or ‘high-level routes,’ in places where one might have expected nothing but large stones. There is a famous one from Zermatt to Arolla. There is a little one between Stye Head and Sea Fell, running from Skew Ghyll to the Ling Mell col above Hollow Stones. There is another—improved but not created by man—along the north face of Pillar Mountain. Of the same nature, and equally unexpected at first, are the ‘rakes’ and ledges which sometimes run right across a rock face, and assist, as one might say, the tactics of the mountaineer, just as the major high-level routes assist him in his strategy. They may even assist the faint-hearted to get off a face altogether. Or, of course, such a ledge may be upside down, and then it is not so good.

The ‘Labyrinth’ near Gortyn in southern Crete has attracted the interest and the curiosity of many generations of travellers visiting the island. When Tournefort explored it systematically in 1700 he observed and recorded the dates inscribed by visitors, who had sometimes added their names, on the rock-face, either at the farthest point which can be reached, or on the sides of the passage leading to it. As the earliest date which he noted was 1444, it may be of interest to draw attention to an even earlier literary source for such visits.

The eight-sided prism of sardonyx, of which the eight faces are represented in Fig. 1, was acquired by Sir Arthur Evans in Eastern Crete, and is certainly of Cretan workmanship and Middle Minoan style.

All the signs are recorded already in Scripta Minoa I (Oxford, 1909) and are numbered there as follows:—

The Olympia Stadium. A detailed publication of the German excavations at the Olympia stadium is given by E. Kunze and H. Schleif, III. Olympiabericht (in JdI 1941), 12 ff., pls. 2–5, 9–10. This shows that the Greek καθέδρα well preserved, consisted of a paved area, fenced round, on which wooden seats must have been placed at the time of the festival. This, and not the later extension, is the ‘schlichte Steinpodium’ referred to in BSA XLIII, 159, n.3.