In their preface to Vol. X of the Cambridge Ancient History the editors promise that in Vol. XI will be found a ‘survey of the several provinces during the two centuries that end with the Antonines.’ The student of Roman Cyprus cannot be advised to turn to this volume, because he will there find no mention of Cyprus whatsoever, even as a word in the index. This neglect—for such, indeed, it seems—is indicative not only of the quite literal insularity of this small and in general insignificant province, but also of a long-standing and unwarranted indifference to Cypriot epigraphy. Since the profitable visit of Waddington in 1862, few epigraphists have landed in Cyprus with any higher purpose than the enjoyment of a busman's holiday; and whereas prehistory, archaeology, sculpture, coinage and the literary sources have been the subject of specialised study, the historian of Cyprus under the Empire, when he takes up the only available collection of inscriptions for his period, that still indispensable work Inscriptiones Graecae ad res Romanas pertinentes, finds there sixty-nine inscriptions only, of which several have been poorly published and some again imperfectly edited.

This is a report of an architectural survey of the site of Praisos in E. Crete, undertaken in 1992. A plan of ancient and modern features was produced, which included remains surviving above ground such as ancient walls, rockcuttings, cut blocks, and spolia, together with more detailed plans of features and concentrations of features. This documentation has been supplemented with photographs, elevation drawings, and descriptions of selected features, especially rock-cuttings. Rock-cut features, common on many Cretan sites, have rarely been described in detail or discussed properly; the article seeks to remedy this state of affairs to some extent. The remains seem to date to the Minoan, archaic, and late classical–hellenistic periods, particularly the last. Some historical conclusions are drawn.

While travelling in Turkey in 1951 as Wilson Fellow of the University of Aberdeen, I visited Eskişehir (Dorylaion) and a number of villages in that area. In the interval between Cox and Cameron's exhaustive survey of that district and my own visit, a considerable amount of new material has come to light, as is generally the case in Anatolia. The following inscriptions are of some interest:

1. Eskişehir, Museum Depôt Inv. no. 186. Grey marble bomos with acroteria; slightly damaged, and badly weathered at one point in the inscribed area. Mouldings above and below. In pediment, part of an eagle, probably the eagle of Zeus; see L. Robert, RevPhil XIII (1939), 203 f.

H. (visible) 1·1 m.; W. 0·49 m., (shaft) 0·36 m.; Th. 0·325 m. Letters 0·035 m. to 0·048 m.; average 0·037 m., with heavy apices and ligatures.

Photograph of squeeze, Fig.

The reference to Zeus Euphranor is new.

The origin of the Doric triglyph has been long a subject of dispute, and the problem is briefly this. The earliest stone triglyph that we have is dated to circa 600 B.C., and there is no direct evidence for earlier examples in other materials except in the temples at Thermon and Calydon, where terracotta metopes were found dated by their style to circa 640 B.c., the Calydon examples being slightly the later of the two. Undecorated terracotta metopes were found in the seventh century temple at Gonnos; on these see below. The spacing of the columns in the Heraion at Olympia, which shows contraction at the angles, has been adduced as evidence of a triglyph-frieze; but the earliest stone column cannot have been put in before 600 B.C., and the existing contraction may be the result of a later arrangement. Pottery of 600–590 B.C. has been found beneath the present structure. Yet the form of the Doric triglyph remained without variation for over four centuries, although it gives many indications of being unsuited to the material in which it has survived. This, it is argued, points to at least as long a period of development before its appearance in stone at the end of the seventh century. What determined this form, and in what material it was developed, are the two questions confrontine students of this problem.

Professor Myres has been the chief agent in inducing English archaeologists to appreciate the significance of the Danubian province for Greek prehistory. Since his first paper in Science Progress, 1896–7, he has frequently discussed in a stimulating manner the relations between the two areas. In his latest pronouncement he not only shews how political considerations have affected the interpretation of the relevant facts, but has stated in an unequivocal way the essential conditions for an objective decision between two contrasted views: ‘not only continuity of material on a series of sites, but coherence of styles within a chronological scheme.’ Six years ago both desiderata seemed far from fulfilment. The Danubian province was still separated by the Balkan wall from the Aegean; not even its relative chronology was clear. Subsequent discoveries by Heurtley in Macedonia and by Fewkes in the Morava valley have substantially reduced the gap between the two provinces in one direction. Even on the Middle Danube Banner and Tompa have established a provisionally acceptable cultural sequence. At the same time fresh comparative material has been made available beyond the Aegean which must affect any interpretation of Danubian-Aegean relationships. A re-examination of some of the issues might then appropriately be dedicated to the far-sighted savant who first inspired my own interest in the Danube valley.

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.

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.

The possibility of establishing the sequence and chronological development of Mycenaean pottery by excavation on a well-stratified site is remote. Remains of the Mycenaean period are, generally, found either on rocky outcrops or in the eroded upper levels of mounds which have been inhabited for many centuries, and there is, thus, little scope for true stratigraphic excavation. The very considerable quantity of Mycenaean pottery which has been discovered in the Mediterranean area and the studies of it which have been published in the last twenty-five years have produced the impression that Mycenaean pottery is ‘well known’. Indeed, such pottery is, on the whole, easily recognized but there is often great difficulty in dating it. Pottery from settlements has largely been neglected, on the grounds of its fragmentary condition, in favour of better-preserved examples from tombs. The result is that, in his volume dealing with chronology, Furumark was able to use, for the L.H. III period, only ten groups of pottery from domestic contexts. Moreover, if the student of today wishes to compare new material with these groups, he will find that the evidence from Mycenae (four of the ten groups) was almost completely lost during the war and that of the rest only the pottery from Athens and from Zygouries is available.

Information about the pattern of settlement and population in the Morea c. 1830 has been used to reconstruct the height zonation of the population (families) at the end of the War of Greek Independence. Statistical testing of the height distributions showed that the proportion of the population living below the 100 m contour, and thus in the lowlands (27.7 per cent), was significantly greater than expected at the regional scale, whilst the higher, more secure mountains repelled permanent settlement. This result, supported by a detailed examination of the height zonation of population by geographical areas, leads the authors to question the long accepted, but largely untested, proposition that the lowlands of Greece were generally devoid of settlements and people during the period of Ottoman rule, especially in its more capricious phases. The lowlands were not, in fact, deserted.

Studies previously conducted by Warren into this group of material, which was found in some of the cists within Magazine XIII of the Palace at Knossos, and considered to belong to a gypsum worker's atelier dating to LM II-IIIa, were concentrated especially on establishing the position of the workshop in the broader perspective of the Minoan stone vase-making industry. I now examine in greater detail one area of study that Warren commented upon — the technical procedures of construction that were employed (with particular reference to the vases), with the intention of building up more accurate information about the tool kits than has hitherto been available.

The excavation is described of a much damaged shrine building five kilometres east-north-east of Sparta, in use from the 7th to the 4th centuries B.C., and again in the 3rd and 4th centuries A.D.

Tile stamps suggest it was dedicated to Zeus Messapeus. Finds include many handmade terracotta statuettes, chiefly of grotesque ithyphallic human figures.

The canal dug by Xerxes across the Mount Athos peninsula in preparation for his invasion of Greece is an important but little-known monument. Geophysical and topographical investigations begun in 1991–2 now suggest that its central section across high ground ran along a deep trench. Its features elsewhere remain to be determined.

Building work at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens in 2003 led to the rediscovery of the two male skeletons from Shaft Grave VI at Mycenae, found by Panayiotis Stamatakis in 1877 as he completed the excavation of Grave Circle A begun by Schliemann. The find provided a triple opportunity. First came a re-assessment of Stamatakis's important and often pioneering role both at Mycenae and in the archaeology of the later Bronze Age, which has generally been overlooked both because of Schliemann's very vocal antagonism and because of his own overwork and early death. Second, a detailed study of the skulls along with the post-cranial bones allowed a reconstruction of the faces of the two men to set beside the earlier reconstructions of the faces of seven individuals from Grave Circle B. This showed that although the two men were very likely related to each other, one could not demonstrate kinship with any of the seven faces from Circle B on the basis of their facial appearance alone. Finally – to be described in subsequent articles – it opened the way for the first modern morphological and chemical analysis (using strontium isotope ratios) of the entire collection of surviving human skeletal material from Grave Circle A to determine the number of individuals represented, their biological sex and their age at death. By assessing the quality of their living conditions as reflected in their skeletal and dental health, and by exploring skeletal evidence of engagement in physical activities through activity-related modifications there was the opportunity to reconstruct the lifestyle of the men and women buried in the grave circle.

Οικοδομικές δραστηριότητες στο Εθνικό Αρχαιολογικό Μουσείο στην Αθήνα το 2003 οδήγησαν στην ανακάλυψη εκ νέου των δύο ανδρικών σκελετών από το Λακκοειδή Τάφο VI, που αττοκάλυψε ο Παναγιώτης Σταματάκης το 1877 με την ολοκλήρωση της ανασκαφής του Ταφικού Κύκλου Α, η οποία ξεκίνησε από τον Heinrich Schliemann. Αυτό το εύρημα μας έδωσε μία τριπλή ευκαιρία. Πρώτον, επαναξιολογήθηκε ο σημανηκός και συχνά πρωτοποριακός ρόλος, που διαδραμάτισε ο Σταματάκης στις Μυκήνες και την αρχαιολογία της ύστερης Εποχής του Χαλκού. Ο ρόλος του αυτός γενικά παραβλέφθηκε εξαιτίας τόσο του έντονου ανταγωνισμού εκ μέρους του Schliemann όσο κοα του υπερβολικού φόρτου εργασίας αλλά και του πρώιμου θανάτου του Σταματάκη. Δεύτερον, η λεπτομερής μελέτη των κρανίων και μετα-κρανιακών οστών επέτρεψε την αποκατάσταση των προσώπων των δύο ανδρών και τη σύγκρισή τους με τα πρόσωπα επτά ατόμων από τον Ταφικό Κύκλο Β, τα οποία είχαν νωρίτερα αποκατασταθεί. Αυτή η σύγκριση έδειξε ότι παρά την πιθανή συγγένεια των δύο ανδρών του τάφου VI, δεν μπορεί να υποστηριχθεί ανάλογη σχέση μεταξύ αυτών και των επτά προσώπων από τον Ταφικό Κύκλο Β με μόνο κρντήριο τα φυσιογνωμικά τους χαρακτηριστικά. Τέλος, όπως θα παρουσιαστεί σε επόμιενα άρθρα, η μελέτη αυτή άνοιξε το δρόμο για την πρώτη σύγχρονη μορφολογική και χημική ανάλυση (της ισοτοπικής αναλογίας του στροντίου) ολόκληρης της συλλογής ανθρωπίνων σκελετικών υπολειμμάτων από τον Ταφικό Κύκλο Α, με στόχο τον προσδιορισμό του αριθμού των αντιπροσωπευομένων ατόμων και τον καθορισμό του βιολογικού φύλου και της ηλικίας θανάτου αυτών. Αξιολογώντας την ποιότητα των συνθηκών διαβίωσης των ατόμων αυτών, όπως αυτή ανπκατροπτίζεται στη σκελετική και οδοντική τους υγεία, και εξετάζοντας σκελετικές μοφτυρίες yrn την ενασχόλησή τους με φυσικές δραστηριότητες κατέστη δυνατό να ανασυνθέσουμε τον τρόπο ζωής των ανδρών και γυναικών ττου είχαν ταφεί στον Ταφικό Κύκλο Α.

A gold myrtle wreath was acquired by the Jean Paul Getty Museum in 1993, and returned to Greece in 2007: it is now housed in the collection of the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki (inv. no. ΜΘ 24000). While its technical features and methods of manufacture have already been discussed in previous publications, this article focuses on provenance, dating, and comparisons. On the basis of a detailed structural analysis and parallels for this wreath, the author suggests Central Macedonia as its provenance and a date towards the end of the 4th century bc. This is the eighth myrtle wreath from this region, implying that this type was made in local workshops. The concluding section of this article offers a brief account of the use of wreaths in ancient Greece.

Ένα χρυσό στεφάνι μυρτιάς, που αγοράστηκε από του Μουσείο γκεττύ το 1993, επιστράφηκε στην Ελλάδα το 2007 και συμπεριλήφθηκε στη συλλογή του Αρχαιολογικού Μουσείου Θεσσαλονίκης (ΜΘ 24000). Οι τεχνικές λεπτομέρειες και η μέθοδος κατασκευής του έχουν παρουσιαστεί σε σχετικές δημοσιεύσεις. Η παρούσα εργασία εξετάςει την προέλευση, τη χρονολόγηση και τη σύγκρισή του με άλλα παρόμοια χρυσά στεφάνια μυρτιάς. Βασισμένη στη λεπτομερή ανάλυση της δομής του αντικειμένου και στα παράλληλά του, η συγγραφέας προτείνει την Κεντρική Μακεδονία ως τόπο προέλευσής του και το χρονολογεί στα τέλη του 4ου αιώνα π.Χ. Είναι το όγδοο χρυσό στεφάνι μυρτιάς από την περιοχή αυτή υποδηλώνοντας ότι αυτός ο τύπος κατασκευαςόταν εκεί, σε τοπικά εργαστήρια. Στο τελευταίο τμήμα της εργασίας γίνεται σύντομη αναφορά στη χρήση των χρυσών στεφανιών στην αρχαία Ελλάδα.

Had I been aware, when I published the reconstruction of the great group of Damophon at Lycosura in volume xiii. of this Annual, that there was even then lying under lock and key in the National Museum of Athens a coin bearing on its reverse a representation of that very group, such misgivings as I had about the correctness of my reconstruction would have been greatly intensified.

The lucky re-discovery of this coin (Fig. 1) and its publication by M. Staïs in the last number of the Journal International d'Archéologie Numismatique afford an embarrassing opportunity for testing the value of the reconstruction, in which M. Staïs has treated me with great consideration. Before discussing his analysis of the coin, I should like to express to him my gratitude for acquainting me so promptly with its discovery and providing me with a cast.

This paper is a summary of the results of a workshop held at Knossos in August 1992. The aims of the workshop were to examine the most coherent and reliable deposits, place them in a chronological sequence, and decide on common terminologies and definitions. This brief paper provides a framework and serves as a common introduction to various detailed studies of Knossian EM–MM pottery by the various authors which have appeared, are in press, or are forthcoming.

It is argued that Byzantine manuscript illustrations to Hesiod's eighth-century BC poem offer realistic evidence for the appearance and function of common Medieval agricultural implements, of which there is little other record. Fourteen manuscripts illustrated from the tenth to sixteenth centuries AD are analysed in the Table on p. 67. In them seventeen implements not named in the text may be regarded as contemporary Medieval pictures, which may also be true of the six implements which Hesiod describes, for traditional textual or arthistorical rules hardly apply to these rustic drawings. Using the methodology of K. D. White's studies of Roman farming, other pictorial, literary, documentary, and the scanty archaeological evidence, together with that of survivals, is applied to these twenty-three implements alone. Conclusions are that the Byzantines may have introduced an eliktrin spade-fork, and possibly a wheel structure, but the article must be read within the context of Roman, Western Medieval and later Mediterranean studies of technology and means of peasant production, for which it offers only a first step in the largely unexplored Byzantine field.

Charred plant remains of middle neolithic to middle bronze age date indicate the processing for storage or consumption of emmer (Triticum dicoccum), hulled six-row barley (Hordeum vulgare), bitter vetch (Vicia ervilia) and acorns (Quercus sp.). Samples of emmer, barley, and bitter vetch from an early bronze age destruction level are valuable evidence for economic diversification at a household level.

The remains of an exceptionally well-preserved Hellenistic wine press were uncovered during a rescue excavation at Knossos in 1977. The architecture, stratigraphy and faunal remains from this campaign were published in BSA 89 (1994) by J. Carington Smith (the excavator) and S. Wall. The artefact assemblages from this excavation, however, have remained unstudied and unpublished until now. The current article presents the artefact assemblages from the wine press excavation and considers them within their urban context at Knossos. The key findings from this excavation relate to the Late Hellenistic wine press and its associated material, which enables us to consider both the ancient winemaking process at Knossos and the economic topography of the city in the decades around the Roman conquest of the island in 67 bc. In addition to the Late Hellenistic phase, material of Minoan, Early Iron Age–Early Archaic, earlier Hellenistic and Early Roman dates is also presented and discussed.

Among the hunting scenes that the Aegean iconography of the second millennium bc offers us, representations related to bird hunting seem to be absent. Newer information has emerged, however, from the restoration of the frescoes from Xeste 3 in the Late Cycladic I / Late Minoan IA settlement of Akrotiri on Thera. On the first floor of Xeste 3, a community sanctuary whose function has been connected with initiation rites, the Great Goddess of Nature (the Potnia) was depicted appearing among young crocus gatherers, possibly during a religious festival related to the regeneration of nature. Two pairs of mature women with sumptuous dress and elaborate jewellery, carrying lilies, wild roses and crocuses as offerings to the Goddess, were rendered on the walls of a corridor that led into the room where the seated Potnia is located. Among the women in the corridor is one holding a sheaf of white lilies and bearing a net pattern with small blue birds on her upper arms. The net has been viewed as a bodice with embroidered miniature swallows. However, specific details of the net pattern indicate the depiction of a real net with captured small, possibly migratory, birds, to be offered to the Potnia. The subject of trapping birds with a net perhaps refers to a ritual act that would have taken place during an autumn or spring festival, given that the trapping of migratory birds takes place during these two transitional seasons. The particular importance and symbolic value of the subject, which enriches the Aegean sacred iconography, is also suggested by the representation of a net with a captured bird on a Late Minoan IB sealing from Agia Triada, which comes from the bezel of a signet ring, apparently made of gold, as well as the rendering of what is possibly a net on the back of a Late Minoan IIIA2 clay male figurine holding a bird, found on the bench in the Shrine of the Double Axes in Knossos.