We give here a partial account of trial excavations undertaken at Knossos by the British School in autumn 1975 at the request of the Greek Government. The site lay in a field on the south-east flank of the acropolis, immediately above and west of the unmetalled track that runs roughly north–south, leading from the upper part of Knossos (Bougadha Metochi) towards the Venetian aqueduct and, eventually, to Arkhanes (see Site Plan, Fig. 1). The field is the property of the Staphylakis family. Until late summer 1975 it had served as rather low grade arable land, covered with stone apparently eroded from the acropolis. The owner in 1975 applied for permission to deep-plough the land with a view to converting it to an olive-grove.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the way in which Greek architects designed Doric capitals. There have been earlier attempts to do this kind of thing, but the difficulty has remained of carrying conviction, of showing that the characteristics and relationships noted do not just happen accidentally but embody the intentions of the designers. This is the excuse for devoting so much of what follows to questions of procedure, to methodological objections and their rebuttal. Readers who are prepared to take such matters on trust will find the results of the investigation set out on pp. 84–93, 97–103.

Mr. Theodoros Sarmas has in his possession a collection of objects, among which are a few of Mycenaean date. The origin of these finds is somewhat obscure, although the owner says that they come from the Mycenaean cemeteries of Klauss and Kallithea, near Patras.

During recent visits to Patras, I had the opportunity to see and study these Mycenaean finds in detail. Since they belong to a class of Mycenaean material which is of some intrinsic interest it seems appropriate that they should be made more widely known.

The museums in Agrinion and Ioannina possess a number of small squat-lekythoi, decorated usually with a single figure flanked by spiral tendrils, which may be seen to form a group. To this nucleus other examples may be added from the Balkans, Italy, and Switzerland. These are all minor vases, but they are of some interest if, as seems possible, they represent a local fabric from north-west Greece.

On deposit in the Borowski collection in Basle are two unpublished Mycenaean bronzes, a short sword and a one-handled bowl, which have no exact provenance. Little more can be said other than the fact that both come from mainland Greece and from the same find context; to judge from the comparably excellent state of preservation both stem from the same grave. A similar grainy, grey-green, dark patina which covers the uncleaned interior of the bowl and one side of the sword constitutes evidence for this interpretation.

Early copper axes from mainland Greece, whether flat or shaft-hole, are rare. Only four are attributable with more or less certainty to the Final Neolithic period: two from Sesklo, one from Alepotrypa and one from Pevkakia. There is one from Crete that was found in a Late Neolithic level at Knossos. Three others might belong to Early Bronze I: a flat axe each from Gona and Marathon Cave, and a unique hammer-axe from Levadia. The three Mainland hoards, from Eutresis, Thebes, and Petralona, containing shaft-hole and flat axes, have been assigned to the latter half of the Early Bronze Age.

Until 1974, the site known to archaeologists as Servia, and discovered by A. J. B. Wace in 1909, about 6 km. north of the town of the same name, was to be found on the right bank of the Haliakmon, immediately downstream from the bridge carrying the main road from Larissa to Kozani (Plate 26a). The bridge shown in the frontispiece to ‘Prehistoric Macedonia’ was blown up by the retreating British Army in the last war; the Bailey bridge which replaced it and the site itself now lie over 30 m. below the surface of a great artificial lake, Limni Polyphytou, which fills the valley of the Middle Haliakmon, Plate 26b. The new bridge is the largest in Greece, and its impressive length emphasizes the importance of the crossing. Over it passes the highway, once the only practicable route connecting Thessaly, and ultimately central Greece, with Macedonia, while the bridges, past and present, marked the only convenient fording-place.

The site of Knossos was occupied more or less continuously from c. 6000 B.C. (earliest neolithic) until the Arab conquest in A.D. 828, a time-span which represents almost 70 per cent of the Holocene or post-glacial period. It therefore offers a rare opportunity for studying the longterm interaction between man and his environment at a single settlement site. At present there is insufficient data to allow comprehensive analysis of the evolution of settlement, economy, and environment at Knossos, and this paper is intended only as a preliminary step towards such a study. In part I aspects of the physical geography of the Knossos area are described, and in part II they are considered in terms of the site's resource base and location. The geomorphological history of the Kairatos valley is used to illustrate the changing relationships between man and environment during the last two millennia.

While completing a study of an unusual group of Roman Corinthian capitals from Athens, I was led to reconsider the current attribution of two members of the group, an anta and a full capital, to an Augustan propylon said to have been built in the Asklepieion. The capitals shared the same source of design and traits of technique as the series made for Hadrian's Arch and for the interior of the Olympieion. It was difficult to accept their association with an inscribed epistyle block, indubitably Augustan in date, that was said to form part of the Asklepieion propylon. Furthermore, the epistyle was too narrow (0·41 m.) to fit over the bedding surfaces of the capitals (0·70 × 0·70 m.), and there was no indication that a backing block had been used.

Evans dates the Lapidary's Workshop, located in the south-west basements of the Palace at Knossos, to his Re-occupation Period (LM IIIB), thus making it and its contents one of three stone jewellery workshops known for the period LM/LH III B, and implying that after LM IIIA 1(/2) part of the Palace at least remained an artistic and administrative centre (if the making of sealstones here implies their concomitant use as impressing agents for sealing sets of documents, tombs, etc.). Other scholars, however, such as Boardman, date the Workshop prior to LM IIIA 1(/2), on the basis of the styles of the motifs carried on the clay nodules and of the unfinished sealstones found in the Workshop.

In the summer of 1972, while participating in the excavation of the Royal Road South at Knossos under the direction of Professor Peter Warren now at Bristol University, I undertook a limited examination of certain boxes in the Stratigraphical Museum in the reasonable hope of supplementing John Betts's earlier discovery of five sealstones and sixty-six sealings that could be related to the Palace. The boxes I examined all carry the label of ‘Evans's Personal Property’, and contain an extraordinary number of faience, clay, and stone objects, all with provenance unknown, but many, if not all, surely from Evans's own excavations. The box containing the seals was marked ‘Box 1878, Evans's Material’.