The site lies on the sloping ground east of the Acropolis, about 300 m. west of the central court of the Minoan palace and 200 m. south of the Unexplored Mansion. In Classical antiquity it must have been on the southern edge of the built-up city; more recently a small olive grove stood there, but this has been increasingly encroached upon by the southward extension of Knossos village. In 1974 house-building operations on the plot of Mr. C. Vlachakis revealed traces of ancient habitation and a cache of Roman sculpture. In the summer of 1976 the sinking of a bothros behind the new Vlachakis house brought to light a stretch of ancient walling and Hellenistic sherds in some quantity. A new excavation was undertaken by the B.S.A. at the request of Dr. St. Alexiou, Ephor of Antiquities in Iraklion and work continued for approximately six weeks. The trenches were then filled in and, later, covered over by a concrete terrace. The present paper contains a detailed study of all the stratigraphy and architectural phases together with a description and interpretation of the Classical and Hellenistic assemblage and occupation. Future papers will deal with the terracottas of this phase and with the earlier and later material.

Mycenaean underground family sepulchres are found in small groups scattered throughout the Greek countryside. It is not unusual for these tombs to hold fewer than a dozen burials, interred over a period of up to six generations, and tombs with only a single burial are not unknown. On the other hand a few tombs in almost every cemetery see continuous use over a period of up to ten generations, and these naturally contain more skeletons. There is a great range in the size of the tombs and the largest seem to have been the tombs of families of high social standing. The more normal tombs average some 7 m.2 in area, and could hold a large number of skeletons thanks to the custom of moving the bones of earlier burials to one side.

In spite of recent excavations within the town, the pottery of early Hellenic Knossos is still better known from the offerings in tombs. Consequently, any domestic deposit containing a wide range of whole profiles will add considerably to our understanding of the pottery in daily use.

Two such deposits are presented here, affording a view of the Knossian sequence at the beginning and at the end of the seventh century B.C. The first is a chance find from a small rescue excavation; the second comes from a well, dug through the debris of the Minoan ‘Unexplored Mansion’, but unassociated with any architectural remains on that site.

Thasos must be one of the best-known, archaeologically, of all Greek colonies, so it is something of a paradox that the material evidence for its foundation and earliest days is far from satisfactory. We have no early graves, and, until 1960, there was no evidence from any very early settlement either. True, in more than one sanctuary it is assumed that the finds go back (in general terms) to the beginning of the life of the Parian colony, but none of this material is demonstrably earlier than c. 650, a time which is very generally thought to be about a generation later than the foundation of the colony. So even quite recently it was possible to write ‘It seems likely that it was founded from Paros by about 680 B.C. … The earliest pottery which can be dated is Corinthian and Rhodian, none of it much earlier than the mid seventh century.’

When I wrote the Excursus (Excursus on the Combed Ware: Evidence for Beekeeping) for the report on the Vari House, I was unfortunately compelled, through ignorance, to leave one obvious loose end. The so-called bronze beehive from Pompeii, discussed on p. 403 with n. 53, remained an enigma of which all that could be definitely said was that it was certainly not a beehive.

This object, it will be recalled, was published, and illustrated in a neat, measured drawing, in T. L. Donaldson's Pompeii (London, 1827) ii., 13 and plate opposite p. 12 (Fig. 1). As near as can be calculated from the indications of scale in Donaldson's plate, the dimensions of the vessel were as follows: height c. 0·61 m.; maximum diameter c. 0·63 m.; diameter of mouth c. 0·28 m.; of lid c. 0·56 m. The brief statement about it in the text was confined to the information that it was made of bronze, was found at Pompeii, and was in the Museum at Naples. All the later works which refer to it, or reproduce the drawing, seem to derive from Donaldson, and I was led to believe from its absence from nineteenth-century catalogues that it had disappeared from the Museum's collection long ago.

I Discuss here some features of the type of storage amphora dubbed ‘SOS’, a large semi-decorated container in use from the later eighth to the first half of the sixth century B.C., and found at a large number of sites around the Mediterranean and beyond. In particular, the evidence of clay analyses carried out at the British School by Richard Jones will be adduced to confirm the Attic origin of the majority of these vases, while other centres of production will be reviewed. I also treat briefly the shape and decoration of the type and the inscriptions which the vases often carry. Other scholars are working on different aspects of the SOS amphora and I have therefore restricted my comments here; similarly, I do not treat at length material which is in course of publication, leaving closer discussion of dating especially to the excavators concerned.

The provenance of vessels of the Marine Style of LMIB from Crete and LHIIA from the Mainland remains an important unsolved problem. This article describes an attempt to discriminate between selected Mainland and Cretan specimens by multivariate analysis of the compositions of their fabrics determined by optical emission spectroscopy with the aim of determining whether the Mainland Marine Style pieces were indeed made on the Mainland, perhaps locally at their find spots, or were imported from Crete or the islands. Accordingly Marine Style sherds have been sampled from seven Mainland, two island, and two Cretan sites, together with a large number of definitively local sherds from each site to serve as a control over the characteristics of the local clays. A distribution map, Fig. 1, and a corpus, as complete as possible, defining and describing the motifs and shapes used in the Marine Style from the Mainland, Crete, and the islands as a whole is included below in order to provide an overview of the available information.

While engaged early in 1977 in the study of Mycenaean material in the storerooms of the Patras Museum, I discovered one box containing some unpublished Mycenaean objects coming from Professor Yialouris' excavations of three LH chamber tombs found by chance at Vrysarion (Kato Goumenitsa) in the Kalavryta region of Achaea in 1959–60. These tombs belong to the large Mycenaean cemetery, at the locality ‘Ayia Paraskevi’, partly excavated by Kyparisses before the war.

This article continues the purpose, begun in the previous issue, of publishing various finds and ideas connected with Knossos and especially with material housed in the Stratigraphical Museum there. On this occasion the discussion is somewhat more discursive, a description of the main objects being inserted into the discussion where convenient or relegated to footnotes where of subsidiary interest. In the main a chronological presentation has been retained.

The nucleus of the collection of books printed before 1701 which are now in the Library of the British School at Athens was left by the distinguished historian of Greece, George Finlay ( 1799–1875), whose name the library still bears. His father, John Finlay (1757–1802), a Major in the Royal Engineers and a Fellow of the Royal Society, who had seen service in the West Indies, was already a book-collector, and many of the books contain his printed label. He was in charge of the Government Powder Mills at Faversham in Kent when his second son, George, was born there on 21 December 1799. Three years later John Finlay died, and in 1806 or 1807 Mrs. Finlay married Alexander MacGregor, a Liverpool merchant. George was put into a boarding school for some years at Everton, Liverpool; and it was here, in 1815, when he was not yet sixteen, that we have the first evidence of his love of books, for he bought in that year at least one seventeenth-century edition. He was later moved to Glasgow to live with an uncle, and afterwards spent some time at the University of Göttingen.

The excavations conducted to the north of and around the House with the Idols during the last two decades have brought to light groups of Hellenistic pottery from domestic contexts which will be presented in the following outline. The purpose of this article is principally to discuss the fine wares and the lamps as a distinct typological group, adding to our scant present-day knowledge of Hellenistic pottery in the Peloponnese outside Corinth. A discussion of the over-all archaeological context of the pottery as well as of the cooking-, coarse-, and pithos wares is to follow in a different context planned for a future publication.

The principal feature of the Hellenistic layer covering this area comprises two strata of construction within the identified dwelling units. These houses lay to either side of what appears to have been a street or alley, running up the slope south of both the Ramp House and the South House, carrying on in an approximately north west – south easterly direction.

I. While excavating at Knossos, Sir Arthur Evans discovered remains of a uniform group of unusual, if not unique, compartments in the North-east area of the Minoan Palace (Plates 32–3, Figs. 1–4). Unlike most groups of adjacent rooms of similar dimensions facing on to a corridor, those at Knossos are joined neither by doorways nor by solid party walls. Rather, their common side walls are interrupted by openings that, from all indications, were designed to be closed or opened by means of sliding panels. These panels, which were probably of wood, would have been slid into grooves, provided for them, by someone standing outside of the rooms themselves.

This paper, which is in two parts, re-employs published evidence to shed new light on the Spartan senator C. Iulius Eurycles Herculanus L. Vibullius Pius. The first part presents a re-edition of the dedication from the heröon of Herculanus, the improved text revealing evidence for a link of kinship between the later Euryclids of Sparta and the dynasty of Commagene. The second part restudies two inscriptions from Mantineia and Corinth which, it is proposed, were originally part of posthumous memorials to Herculanus erected in those two cities.