A second season of work at Can Hasan took place between 10th September and 10th October with nine days at the end to complete the final cleaning of the site and the registering of the finds. As last year, we employed three trained men from Beycesultan and ten unskilled men from the village.

In addition to myself and my wife, the staff included Mr. N. H. S. Kindersley, field assistant; Messrs. R. Fonseca and I. Walls, architects; Mr. R. E. Oakley, field assistant; and Misses A. C. Cruikshank, C. MacLucas and A. Searight, pottery assistants. Bay Hayrettin Solmaz of the Konya Museum represented the Turkish Government.

The excavations at Çatal Hüyük, the neolithic city mound in the Konya Plain, which were begun in 1961 were continued during the summer of 1962. The second season of excavation began on 7th June and lasted until 14th August, sixty working days, with a labour force which never exceeded thirty-five men, mostly trained under our foreman, Veli Karaaslan, at Beycesultan and Hacılar. Once again our trusted ustas included Rifat Çelimli, Mustafa Duman and Bekir Kalayci. Survey equipment and transport for the expedition were generously provided by Turkse Shell, Ankara.

The 1962 season was financed by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, New York, a bequest from the late Mr. Francis Neilson, the Australian Institute of Archaeology and its President, Mr. W. J. Beasley, The British Academy, the University of Edinburgh and the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. In addition the Director had a personal fellowship from the Bollingen Foundation, New York.

Excavations at Alahan Monastery were continued during the summer of 1962 for a period of exactly eight weeks, from early July until 1st September. The Director was accompanied by Mrs. Gough, and Mr. Robin Guthrie acted as his chief assistant. Messrs. Gerard Bakker and Anthony Harrison, the expedition's architects, were responsible for the survey and partial restoration of newly excavated buildings, and Miss Susan Harrison for pottery and small finds. Miss Caroline Pickard and Mr. David White were field assistants. Bayan Süheyla Keskil, Director of the Antakya Museum, acted as the official representative of the Turkish General Directorate of Museums and Antiquities. To her and to the Kaymakam of Mut the expedition is grateful for their co-operation. An average of twenty-four workmen was employed, many experienced from earlier excavations at Alahan and Dağ Pazarı, and Süleyman Yemenici was again a most efficient foreman. The number of visitors to the site showed a great increase over 1961, and if a jeep road could be built to cover the 300 metres of steep slope from the main road to the monastery, there is no doubt that this outstanding monument of the early Christian period would soon be better known and appreciated (Pl. XXXa).

The high Anatolian plateau is divided from the south coast of Turkey by the far higher Taurus chain. This extends south-west from Armenia in a vast double-curve, accommodating the coastal plains of Cilicia and Pamphylia and terminating abruptly in the wide, rugged promontory of Lycia (Fig. 1). The width of the promontory is about 120 km.; its mountains rise to 3,000 m., and it was aptly characterized by Strabo as τραχὺς καὶ χαλεπός ἀλλ' εὐλίμενος. Between Fethiye and Antalya steep cliffs give way to sandy beaches in three places, the Xanthus valley and the plains of Demre and Finike. West of Demre, beneath towering cliffs, is the little harbour of Kaş; behind these cliffs the ground drops to a wide inland basin, whose outlet is the long and spectacular Demre gorge. Inland roads, where they exist, are steep and tortuous. The Xanthus valley carries a road to Fethiye; a poor road from Kaş, and a tolerable one from Finike lead to the upland plain of Elmalı, which has roads leading west to Fethiye and north-east to Korkuteli; from this last town there is an easy road north-east towards Burdur, and more difficult routes north-west to Tefenni and south-east to Antalya.

In 1943 the Academy of Sciences of the Georgian S.S.R. published at Tiflis, as Part XIII.B of the Bulletin of the Georgian Government Museums, a book of 171 pages by the late B. A. Kuftin (1892–1953), entitled Urartskii “kolymbarii” u podoshvy Ararata i Kuro-Arakskii Éneolit [An Urartian “Columbarium” on the slopes of Ararat and the Copper Age of the Kur-Araxes basin]. The terminus technicus “columbarium” (Latin = a pigeon-cot) is translated in German as “Urnenhalle”. More appropriate here would be to call it an “Urn-field” but “columbarium” is retained here as having no adequate English translation. In the original the Russian text is followed by a version in Georgian and a very brief English summary. This book in fact contains two essays, the first dealing with the “columbarium”, the second with the Copper Age remains under the lava to the south of the “columbarium”, and called the “Clay Citadel”. We are here only concerned with the first.

The end of the Çatal Hüyük West culture is shrouded in mystery. Both Çatal and Kara Hüyük South were apparently deserted and never reoccupied and it is only at Can Hasan Hüyük east of Karaman that later deposits have been recognised overlying remains of the early Chalcolithic culture. Elsewhere the evidence lies buried in the cores of the numerous city mounds of the Early Bronze Age period. Late Chalcolithic remains are fairly common in the Konya Plain, but they were in nearly every case found on sites where no earlier or later remains were encountered. This might suggest a shift in the settlement pattern of the plain after the end of the Early Chalcolithic period (see map, Fig. 1).

The scholar who works in two fields at the same time has a distinct advantage over those who work in only one, namely that he can bring to bear on a problem considerations which are new to the field to which it belongs but have been found to be valid in the other. In this way new light can be shed on hitherto unsolved problems, light which may in fact lead to their being solved. This, in fact, is the aim of the present discourse. The problem in question is the unsolved metre of the Hittite epic. The solution here offered is based on the writer's researches into possible influences—notably in the form—of this epic on the Greek epic tradition which lies behind the Homeric poems. The results of these researches will not be available in their entirety for some time, but the author is publishing in advance this individual conclusion which he feels may be of interest to classical scholars and, in particular, to orientalists.