L.H. IIIB 2 has until recently been ill-served in archaeological publication, for two reasons. Firstly it does not seem to have been the custom in this period in mainland Greece to put much pottery in tombs. Secondly at settlement sites the period ended in a vast destruction which was preceded by either evacuation or plundering. This resulted in debris levels containing a mass of sherd material (often of earlier periods) but few restorable pot,s and thus of no interest to early excavators. Until 1966 practically the only L.H. IIIB 2 material of settlement type readily available for comparison was that from Schliemann's excavations at Mycenae illustrated in Mykenische Vasen, and the sherds from the same group in the British Museum Catalogue.

The discovery at Tiryns in 1957 of deep and extensive debris of this period (which has now been published in outline) concentrated attention on the period and has enabled some studies of historical importance to be made.

Last year's report contained an account of the excavation of the building on the hills to the east of the Eurotas, which has been identified with the Menelaion, the shrine of Menelaos and Helen mentioned by Herodotus and Pausanias. Besides the numerous archaic objects which were then published, this work produced a few sherds of Mycenaean pottery and fragments of Mycenaean terracottas, always at a lower level than the deposits of Laconian and Geometric ware. A further clue was afforded by a Mycenaean house, which was found by a trial-pit on the eastern peak of the hill, and Tsountas' report that Mycenaean sherds were to be found on the surface in the neighbouring fields was also verified.

In May 1970 an Albanian delegation attended the Second International Congress of Southeast European Studies at Athens, and one of the delegates, Professor Frano Prendi, with his characteristic kindness, sent me copies of three Communications which were delivered to the Congress. As the illustrations in these Communications were of poor quality, he sent me two photographs from which two of the illustrations had been made. I reproduce these photographs here as Plates 34 and 35.

The general thesis of the delegation was that the formation of the Illyrian ethnos in central and south Albania began at the end of the ‘Eneolithic’ period; that an autochthonous evolution followed which spanned the entire Bronze Age and continued into the Early Iron Age; and that during this long period the ‘Ur-Illyrians’, if I may style them so, had reciprocal exchanges with other people, but preserved their own ethnic character.

The four seasons of excavation conducted by D. M. Robinson at Olynthos between 1928 and 1938 produced a large quantity of red-figure pottery from settlement and cemetery. This material was published in volumes 5 and 13 of the final report. Robinson recognized that many of the red-figure fragments were of local Chalcidic fabric, and he tried to distinguish a few hands, but he made no detailed study. In ARV 1507–9 J. D. Beazley attributed a number of vases to a Painter of Olynthos 5.156 and a Group of Olynthos 5.141, and noted that they ‘might be local Olynthian’ but he ‘did not see that they differed from Attic in clay or technique’. More recently a few local red-figure vases, from private collections and rescue excavations, have been published, and others, still unpublished, are on display in the museums of Salonica and Polygiros. The excavations at Torone, still in progress, have also produced some fragments of non-Attic red-figure. On the basis of this material I have tried to distinguish more clearly some of the red-figure painters active in the Chalcidice in the fourth century; but I ought to emphasize that there are many vases and fragments not included here.

The outstanding feature of the excavations of 1925 was the discovery, in the circumstances above described, of substantial portions of a marble statue, of more than life size, representing a helmeted warrior. These comprise (1) the head and armless torso down to the waist; (2) two portions of the marble crest, which join each other, and fit on to the helmet; (3) the left leg, from knee to ankle; (4) part of the right foot, lacking heel and toes (material, scale, and style as far as can be seen in its damaged condition, make the attribution practically certain); (5) a small piece from the rim of the marble shield, which we must restore the figure as holding.

There are two cuttings for the crest on the top of the helmet, of which that nearer the front is ·085 m. long, the other ·10 m.; a plain surface lies between them, ·026 m. long; the cuttings are nearly straight-sided, but vary in width between ·028 and ·035 m. A part of the tenon of the crest was found broken off short in the rearward cutting, and has since been rejoined to the fragment to which it belongs.

Damage: both arms are missing, being broken away at the shoulders, and in addition the surface has been flaked off from the back of the right shoulder and the chest close to the arm-pit.

The archaeological evidence for the sack of Smyrna is considered, together with later material. It is argued that this confirms a date for the sack around 600 BC, early in Alyattes' reign.

The floruit of the Cretan jewellery workshop in the Iron Age is attested by many finds. To these are now added two gold finger-rings, each decorated with two attached embossed heads, recently acquired by the Metaxas Collection in Heraklion (Plate 23, a). They not only enrich our knowledge of this important branch of the art of Crete, but also prove Cretan priority in the adoption of a decorative technique widely used in the islands and in Ionia. I am greatly indebted to Mr. N. Metaxas for permission to publish these important works.

In the spring of 1955 the Water Company, extending its drainage system to include Erechtheion Street, a road in the neighbourhood south of the Acropolis running south from the street of Dionysius the Areopagite, uncovered part of the wall and a gate of the ancient city. The Ephoria of Acropolis Antiquities under its then director, Mr. J. Miliades, undertook the excavation of these remains. With the aid of his epimelete, Dr. G. Dontas, the present director of the Acropolis, he cleared the wall and the gate down to bedrock, and extended his investigation to uncover as many building remains and other finds as possible, under a fair amount of pressure from the Water Company, who were in a hurry to begin their own work. The excavation, which took place from March until June 1955, has added considerably to our knowledge of the topography of the area during the classical period; at the same time it uncovered a Dark Age cemetery.

The Ashmolean Museum, with the help of the Sir Arthur Evans Fund, has recently acquired three sets of material, vases and bronzes, said to have been found in Crete. Such a provenance is confirmed by the nature of the objects themselves. The three sets were acquired at different times on the London market, but the first (sixteen painted vases) and the second (eleven bronze weapons and tools) were said to have come from one and the same site, reputed to be somewhere in the region of Siteia. The remaining set of objects (eleven painted vases) has no more precise provenance than ‘Crete’.

The material appears all to be of Late Minoan III date; the twenty-seven painted vases include examples of Late Minoan IIIA, IIIB, and IIIC date, and there is probably a similar chronological spread among the bronzes. As comparatively little material of the same categories has been published in detail, the opportunity is taken to illustrate and describe these Oxford acquisitions as a contribution to Late Minoan III studies.

The necropolis of the city of Tharros in Sardinia has been extremely prolific in tomb furniture, and many lamps have been found there. Over forty lamps from this site are in the collections of the British Museum. All were acquired at the same time, and most of them were said to be from tomb groups. The groups containing lamps are Tombs 1–10, 12, 16, 18–19, 22, 26, 30–31, 33, 60–63, 65–71 (the tomb numbers for the whole collection run from 1–33, 50–57, 60–63, and 65–71; there are thus several gaps in the sequence).

The great majority of the British Museum lamps from Tharros are of Athenian manufacture and with the recent publication of Howland's book on lamps from the Agora these can be dated very accurately. But unfortunately such is the indeterminate nature of the tomb groups themselves that these lamps cannot be used to date the objects said to have been found with them. As will be seen in the brief descriptions given below in the Catalogue, many of the objects found in a given tomb are in almost impossibe chronological juxtaposition to one another, and few tomb groups, if any, can be regarded as homogeneous (except perhaps the Roman tombs 50–57 with glass cinerary urns and brittleware pottery, which, being lampless, do not concern us here). But looking at the objects from the tomb groups with lamps as a whole, one might put forward the following remarks.

In 1981 an unplundered Mycenaean chamber tomb was excavated at Krini NW of Patras. Two separate layers of burials were found in the chamber, and its use is dated from LH III A to the middle of LH III C. The LH III C warrior's burial is of particular interest. It was furnished with a bronze Naue II sword, which has preserved in good condition its scabbard, made of wood and leather and decorated with bronze strips and studs. The warrior's burial and its furnishings are studied here in relation to the other LH III C warrior burials known from the Patras region, and their significance is discussed. The analysis of the pottery found in the tomb gives evidence for the existence and dating of local pottery workshops active in the region.

In 1983 the Larisa Museum received an inscribed stele, purporting to be from the farming area of Agia Triada. Even today, parts can be seen in this area of the fortifications of an ancient city, thought to be the Thessalian Skotoussa. The inscription comprises 154 lines, and is written in the Thessalian (Pelasgian) dialect; it dates from 197–185 BC. It is a decree of the city (which is now proved to be Skotoussa), and concerns the description of a zone inside and outside the city walls, which was to contain no privately owned land. The decree was passed as part of the reorganization of the defences of the city after the collapse of Macedonian supremacy in the region. The zone was defined in detail using as reference points the towers, distances between the towers, and other sections of the walls, as well as parts of the city adjoining the wall. The result of such a systematic body of cross-reference is a description of nearly the whole of the city's fortifications. Following a topographic survey of the Agia Triada region, and taking into account older surveys, a restoration of the course of the wall is attempted. Using the inscription as a guide, a comparison is made between the sections of the wall that are described, together with other place-names appearing in the inscription, and the surviving ruins at Agia Triada.

In recent articles the present writer has used the evidence of brickstamps in proposing new dates for the walls of Thessaloniki, for the mosaics of the second phase of the Rotunda (now dedicated to St. George), and for the Byzantine palace. In each case, reference was made to only two or three examples, and it is with a view to reinforcing and developing the arguments already expressed that all the published fifth-century brickstamps recognizable as such are assembled here (with the addition of some unpublished examples).

We here conclude the series of reports on our journeys in the Dodecanese Islands. The work on Rhodes, begun by Mr. and Mrs. Lazenby and Hope Simpson in August 1968, was continued by Mr. and Mrs. Hope Simpson during the end of August and early September 1970. Hope Simpson also made a short visit to Chalki in September, and a longer visit to Astypalaia in October. As previously, our main objective has been to gauge the extent of prehistoric, and especially of Mycenaean, habitation in the Dodecanese. We have now visited all the main islands, for varying periods of time and with varying degrees of success. Much still remains to be done, and the results are subject to the usual limitations inherent in surface exploration. There was, for instance, no time to complete a full survey of the island of Rhodes, and our work there was more in the nature of a ‘reconnaissance in force’. It should be explained, however, that in addition to the usual obstacles of the terrain, the widespread Hellenistic and Roman settlements on Rhodes have evidently covered or obliterated most of the signs of earlier habitation on the same sites. On Astypalaia, for instance, conditions were much more favourable for eclectic surface search, and the measure of success was accordingly greater.

The recognition of Plato by the Arab philosophers, and consequently by the Seljouks of Roum, has long been the accepted explanation of the fact that his name is popularly associated with a remarkable spring (Eflatoun Bounari = Plato's spring) with ‘Hittite’ ruins some fifty miles west of Konia, the Seljouk capital, and with a spring at Konia itself: the connection has not hitherto been made clear. Stray references to Plato in the description of this part of Asia Minor by the Turkish geographer Hadji Khalfa (1648) seem to throw some fresh light on the subject.

These references are three in number. The first records the existence of a ‘tomb of Plato the divine’ in the citadel at Konia. This is also mentioned earlier by the thirteenth-century geographer Yakut, one of Hadji Khalfa's acknowledged sources: Yakut adds that the tomb was ‘in the church by the mosque.’

Several rock-cut features, exposed on the surface of a trackway in the Tholos area of Kastri, Kythera, were excavated in July–August 2000 as a synergasia between Kythera Island Project and 2nd Ephoria of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities. Although the surviving deposits were extremely shallow, they produced large quantities of conical cups and other pottery of Late Minoan I date. Further comparative analysis of the features themselves and their finds suggests that these are the remains of tomb chambers similar to those excavated in the area in the 1960s. These tombs and their assemblages show extremely strong cultural connections with Crete, but also idiosyncrasies that probably reflect the particular mortuary customs of the island.

This article presents the methodology and results of archaeological fieldwork conducted at the small fifth to sixth century ad port settlement at Leukos on the island of Karpathos in the Dodecanese. Fieldwork, undertaken from 2008 to 2011, comprised topographic, architecture and artefact surveys of the visible remains.

This study examines the relationships between birds and liquids in the Minoan, Cycladic and Mycenaean cultures. Objects under investigation are bird-shaped vessels, bird figurines attached to vessels, and some special pouring vessels decorated with painted bird motifs, which are listed in an accompanying catalogue. Analysis of this material demonstrates that images of both doves and waterbirds were consistently linked to liquid-containing vessels, but there are significant chronological and regional variations regarding the preference for bird species. Another aspect fluctuating with period and place is the type of contact created between liquid and bird motif. Three categories dividable into three or two subtypes can be recognised, which mainly differ from each other by the degree of proximity that is established between the fluid and bird motif. It is argued that these differences reflect variations in the perception of birds regarding their relationship to liquids. While a direct and active participation of birds in the flow of liquids such as water and milk is observable in many Cretan and Cycladic objects, the artefacts from the Greek Mainland show a different pattern, whereby less direct contact combined with a stylised rendering suggests that the bird motif was accorded a more passive role by symbolising the positive effect of the flow of water. These findings contribute to recent scholarly debates on human–animal relationships and ontologies in the Aegean Bronze Age.

Following the destruction of Minoan palaces in LM I B, a new social reality emerged in Crete. Important economic and administrative changes occurred over a period of 250 years (LM II–III). Originally, a strictly centralized system was imposed by Knossos with the aim of securing authority over part of the island in LM II–III A 1. Later, in LMIII A 2 the economic and administrative system appears to have changed. This new system was decentralized and based on regional centres. Knossos was at the summit, a few powerful regional centres were subjects to the palace. In the LM III B period, after the final destruction of the palace of Knossos, the scene changes again. The economic system rested on independent regional centres of greater or smaller economic impact, which were scattered all over the island. The most important of these centres was undoubtedly Chania.