Finds of the topshells Monodonta turbinata (Born 1780) and M. articulata Lamarck 1822 are discussed. ‘Rings’ made of Monodonta shells were used as rings or pendants

The British excavations at Mycenae in 1952 were conducted with a research grant from the American Philosophical Society assisted by contributions from the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trustees, and the British School at Athens under whose aegis the work was carried out.

The excavations began on June 30th, and all active digging ceased on August 18th, though several days were needed to clear up everything and transport the finds to the National Museum in Athens and the Nauplia Museum. Of the finds the bronzes, the ivories, the inscribed tablets, and some pottery wanted for special study were taken to Athens and everything else taken to Nauplia and placed in a separate room. Of the pottery the archaic and classical pottery and the terracotta figurines from the sanctuary by the Causeway, from the excavations of 1950 and 1952, and most of the classical and Hellenistic fragments from the Perseia Fountain House are now in Athens. All the prehistoric pottery except for a few select pieces is in the Nauplia Museum.

The Kamares cave on Mount Ida has been known now for more than twenty years as a prehistoric sanctuary, but its full excavation was only carried out in the summer of 1913 by a party from the British School, which thus resumed the work in Crete discontinued since Palaikastro gave way to Sparta in 1906. This early fame of the cave was due to the discovery in it in the early nineties of a number of vases and a few figurines, which Dr. Hazzidakis secured from the shepherd who had found them and placed in what was then the Museum of the Archaeological Syllogos at Candia. Some of the vases bear the marks of the rivets with which their peasant owner mended them.

The results of our excavation have so greatly supplemented this first instalment that the authorities of the Candia Museum have been able to do a great deal in the way of the reconstruction of vases, of which until now only small pieces were available, and these restorations have been put at our service for the photographs which accompany this report.

As soon as these vases were discovered they were at once recognised as belonging to a kind until then almost entirely unknown, and the name ‘Kamares,’ which was at once given to them, still remains current as a general description of that kind of Cretan pottery which has a black ground and white or polychrome ornament, although at the present stage of research rather as a convenient name for the technique than with any chronological meaning.

This paper looks at the period of the first regular use of pictorial vase painting in Crete: LM II–III A2 early. The focus is on Knossos, the major findspot for Minoan pictorial pottery of this distinct pre-destruction period. The shapes, motifs and overall character of Minoan pictorial pottery are discussed, as well as the extent of its influence on the earliest Mycenaean figure-style vase-painting.

In 1950 the Anastelosis Section of the Greek Archaeological Service began the restoration of the ‘Tomb of Clytemnestra’, Fig., Plate 35. In view of our previous researches on the tomb, Dr. Papademetriou and the Anastelosis Section invited us to observe the work and to collaborate by a careful examination of the threshold and other points. Dr. Papademetriou has already published an account of the work himself, and the following notes with the plan and photographs are offered as a supplement to what he has written. We are much indebted to him for his friendly help.

Writing in the year 1817 Sir William Gell says: ‘The southern district of Maina has never been thoroughly explored by any English traveller except Leake.’ After nearly a century has elapsed this remark is still practically true. Pouqueville, Boblaye, and Le Bas have, among others, given us accounts of their travels in French. German research is represented by such names as Bursian, Curtius, Weil and Philippson, but with a single exception no account of the district has appeared in English since Leake's. The work in question was published in 1869, and is an edition of a selection from the diary kept by Lord Carnarvon on his travels in Maina and other parts of Greece, in the year 1839. References to archaeology are, however, few and far between in its pages, and it does not profess to aim at completeness, since Lord Carnarvon, who penetrated, it is true, as far as Taenarum, returned, as he went, by the track on the west coast, leaving the east coast of the peninsula unvisited.

The excavations of 1908 more than fulfilled expectations in the amount of light that was shed on the later history of the Spartan pottery, so that it is now possible to write an account of the development and decline of the Laconian fabric; which account, beginning in the ninth or tenth century, ends with the latter half of the fourth, when the pottery loses its local characteristics in the various styles that appear to have been common to the whole Greek world during the last three centuries before the Christian Era.

During the Archaic period in Greece, many small centres were at work, producing bronze statuettes for local use. The existence of these centres has only been partially recognised and their history has still to be written. By the second quarter of the fifth century, most of them had been absorbed by the large industries, such as Argos, Corinth and Sikyon; just so, at a somewhat earlier date, the manufacture of vases in nearly all other Greek towns gave way before the vases of Athens.

The bronzes of Arcadia belong to one of the few local groups that has not been overlooked. Sections of it have come under the notice of more than one scholar, though it has never been surveyed completely.

It is one of the most vital, since it began to show its independent character as early as the seventh century, and it survived the competition of such overpowering neighbours as Argos and Corinth throughout the fifth. In the sixth century it was very productive and very individual in style. It is, therefore, easy to recognise. All these points claim our interest. But the bronzes themselves, peasants carrying their sheep and calves, dressed in high hats and embroidered cloaks, gods and goddesses in the likeness of Arcadian shepherds and Arcadian girls,—these not only interest but also delight us by their naïve charm and their fitness to the Arcadian uplands from which they come.

I. The Ayiofarango Valley

E1 (M, GR, BM)

A terrace at about the 200 m. contour, east of and above the road from Kaloi Limenes to A. Kyriaki, c. 100 m. from the point where the road crosses the watershed into the catchment area. The terrace is c. 150 m. (N.-S.) by 50 m. (E.-W.), bounded on the east by steep, bare upward gradients, and on the west by a steep downward slope covered only with low scrub. Two possible stretches of wall were found on the western slope, but the only certain structural remains were a modern sheep pen and a circular wall, c. 1–5 m. in diameter, which appeared to be a filled-in well. Abraded sherds were quite common on the western slope, but scarcer on the terrace.

Seventeen pottery sherds from the seventh century BC pottery kiln uncovered at Knossos in 1993 were analysed by neutron activation at N.C.S.R. Demokritos. Fifteen of the seventeen sherds form an extremely homogeneous chemical group whose composition parallels Late Minoan I and Classical/Hellenistic pottery from Knossos. The two chemically different samples are also physically different, being much coarser and more severely burned.

George Finlay died at the age of seventy-five on 24 January a hundred years ago and I am honoured to pay tribute to this distinguished Scottish scholar and philhellene on the occasion of his centenary. It is indeed fitting that this should take place in the School which possesses many of his books and papers.

It might well be asked why there has as yet—to the best of my knowledge—been no full biography of Finlay. A glance at the available material may suggest the answer. What are usually known as the Finlay Papers housed in the British School comprise a formidable collection. Perhaps the best-known items are the so-called Journals. They are in part genuine journals in the sense of a day to day record, particularly of Finlay's experiences when travelling round the Aegean, or in Turkey, or on a visit to Scotland, journeying via Malta and France or Switzerland.

Although the MM III B and LM I A ceramic phases of the Neopalatial period have in central Crete recently been subjected to refinement and revision, some of it controversial, in the east of the island they are still not very clearly defined. It is often argued that these phases see important changes in Minoan political geography, with Knossos seemingly extending its influence farther afield than ever before. Thus closer definition of these phases in east Crete in relation to the centre of the island represents an important step. It is in this light that three deposits from Palaikastro are here fully presented and discussed, with a view to clarifying the nature of the MM III B and LM I A phases in east Crete. The deposits in question were excavated during the recent programme of British School excavations conducted between 1986 and 1996. They are from three different contexts, in Building 6, Area 6 and Building 2 respectively, and contain abundant pottery (447 catalogued pots in total). The pottery from these deposits consists largely of cups, stored in some quantity in what seem to be small storerooms or ‘pantries’. Although east Cretan Neopalatial pottery does exhibit its own stylistic and typological traits, there are sufficient comparisons with material in central Crete to assign the deposits from Building 6 and Area 6 to MM III B, and the one from Building 2 to LM I A. It is hoped that the publication of this material will serve as a clear basis for future discussions of these significant phases in east Crete.

It is the aim of this note to publish, as soon as possible after its discovery, a single kernos found in the Laureion. The significance of the piece is that it is another example of an uncommon type of pot recently studied and thought to be in effect confined, in Greece, to Eleusis and Athens— apart from one lone stray also found somewhere in that same Laureion district. A further interest is that both Laureion kernoi came from mining sites, but whereas the first was a surface find from a slag heap, the new kernos was found in the course of excavations, in a closed archaeological context.

This paper draws attention to the potential for recognizing exported Attic Protogeometric pottery by macroscopic characteristics of its fabric, whose salient features are described. The utility of these criteria are tested on a group of pottery from Asine in the Argolis whose Attic origin was not recognized in the original publication. A brief survey of the distribution of exported Attic Protogeometric pottery shows it to occur mainly in the southern Aegean, with notable concentrations at Lefkandi, Aigina, Asine and Knossos. A list of exports is appended to this survey.

When I was at Candia in the autumn of 1913, Dr. Hatzidakis, the Ephor of Antiquities, told me that a report had reached him of a Minoan site near the village of Pláti in the plain of Lasithi, and suggested that the School should apply for a permit to excavate it. Before leaving Crete I made a preliminary inspection of the site, and the prospects seemed to justify the School in undertaking the work. The local account was that a woman had had a dream that by digging in a certain place a church bell would be found. The villagers accordingly dug a hole in the place indicated, and found not a bell but an early piece of wall and some fragments of obsidian. A report of the discovery was made to the authorities by the scholarch of Tsermiádo, the chief village of Lasithi, and it was this document to which Dr. Hatzidakis called my attention.

The usual kindness of the Cretan authorities produced the required permit, and by the 25th of April the site had been measured by the government engineer in accordance with the law now in force, and we were able to begin the work. This lasted for exactly a month, until the 25th of May, the number of men employed being for the most part about thirty, and resulted in the discovery of the Minoan settlement described in the second section of this report. The party consisted of Messrs. J. P. Droop, R. M. Heath, and M. L. W. Laistner with the Director in charge throughout.

The first two fieldwork seasons of the Kato Phana Archaeological Project took place in 1997 and 1998 as a collaborative venture between the British School at Athens and the Mytilene Ephorate of the Greek Archaeological Service. The work comprised archaelogical surface survey and mapping of the lower Kato Phana Valley, cleaning and planning of the sanctuary of Apollo Phanaios and geophysical testing of selected areas around the sanctuary site. This article first sets out the aims of the Project and describes earlier work at the cult centre (Geometric to Early Christian periods) by K. Kourouniotes and W. Lamb. This is followed by an account of the survey methodology and of the results gained: these include the location of Bronze Age findspots NE and SW of the cult centre and a dense concentration of sherds, tile and ancient masonry, ranging in date from the Archaic to Early Christion periods, radiating out from the sanctuary, particularly to the S and SE. To the NW, the survey also succeeded in identifying the ancient quarry site from which grey limestone blocks were cut for the sanctuary constructing. The paper concludes with an account of the geophysical testing carried out at Kato Phana, and looks forward to the next projected phase of the Project's fieldwork.

This article reconsiders from a methodological point of view some of the ways in which the ancient Macedonians and their culture have been assessed by recent historians. It is inspired by Professor E. N. Borza's book on this issue, where archaeological material is widely used in ways which do not always accord with the data or their interpretation. It has to be noted that the article is focused only on the evidence deriving from Vergina, a site of which the author has a direct knowledge, due to participation in its archaeological research over a long period.

The sickle, as attribute of Kronos, was considered by certain scholars to be the sickle with which the corn is reaped, and this would be a reliable argument for the opinion that Kronos was from of old a god of the harvest. Recently W. Staudacher has advanced the opinion that the harpe, as the Greek word is, is a sickle-shaped sword of Oriental origin, and uses this as an argument for deriving the myth of the separation of Heaven and Earth from the Orient; but he has not succeeded in proving his thesis. I have expressed doubt that the harpe of Kronos was a sickle, and said that it may have been a sword, but I have also called attention to the fact that the harpe is said by Hesiod to be provided with sharp teeth, being reminded of certain implements from the Neolithic Age in which sharp chips of flint are inserted in a stick of bone or wood, as in e.g. harpoons.

In a recent volume of this Annual (XLV 126 ff.) I discussed the alphabetic numeral system as employed in Attica; in the present article I examine the use of letters in Attica and elsewhere to identify different items, often similar in character and appearance, with a view of facilitating reference and simplifying inventories. For such a purpose letters have certain advantages over other symbols which might be devised; they are brief and familiar and they occur in a recognized order. They thus approach nearly to the use of ordinal numbers (contrasting sharply with acrophonic numerals, which are invariably used to represent cardinal numbers), though it cannot be said that they constitute a numeral system, any more than we could claim that we in English use an alphabetic numeral system because, e.g., a, b, c, d are used on p. 4 below to distinguish four items which might equally well have been numbered 1, 2, 3 and 4. The letters here under consideration were not, and could not be, made the instruments of arithmetical calculation, and the highest number expressed in this way in any inscription known to me is 106 (Inscr. Délos 1432 Aa ii 21; see below, p. 8).

Various scholars have dealt briefly with the subject, but the accumulation of a mass of new evidence calls for a fresh treatment, especially of the part played by such letters in inventories. No technical name has, I believe, been given to letters so used, and in this article I call them ‘letter-labels’, a title which emphasizes the function they fulfil in the majority of cases where they occur.

The stratification of cults at famous sanctuaries of the ancient world, reflected for the most part in their local mythology, has long been interpreted as evidence of the invasion of older by newer gods and religious systems. A religion carried by a conquering race or by a missionary priesthood to alien lands superimposes itself, by force or persuasion, on an indigenous cult: the process is expressed in mythological terms under the figure of a personal combat between the rival gods or of the ‘reception’ of the new god by the old. Eventually either one god or the other succumbs and disappears or is relegated to an inferior position; or, again, the two may be more or less completely identified and fused.

Of the religions of antiquity it is seldom possible to do more than conjecture by what methods and processes these transitions were actually carried out. The paper which follows is an attempt to examine some phenomena of the superimposition of cult in the case of a modern Mahommedan sect—the Bektashi—acting on the sanctuaries of the mixed populations of Turkey and in particular on Christian saint-cults. So far as we can see, where Bektashism has gained ground at the expense of Christianity this has been accomplished without violence, either by processes analogous to that known to the ancient world as the ‘reception’ of the new god by the old, or simply by the identification of the two personalities.