Excavations at Palaikastro. II: § 1.—The Second Campaign—Outlying Sites

Extract

We resumed work on March 23, 1903. The headquarters of the expedition were again at Angathia. Mr M. N. Tod, Assistant-Director of the School and Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, had preceded me, going overland. Mr W. L. H. Duckworth, Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and University Lecturer in Anthropology, and Mr R. McG. Dawkins, Scholar of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, arrived a few days later. Mr C. T. Currelly, of Victoria College, Toronto, who had been digging for the Egypt Exploration Fund under Professor Petrie, joined us for the last six weeks of the season.

The Roussolakkos trenches being full of water, I decided to start work at Kouraménos on a bay 1½ miles further north, where in 1902 I had seen the foundations of a wall running inland from the sea, enclosing the best part of the plain at the head of the bay and rejoining the sea half a mile beyond. It seemed possible that this was the wall mentioned in the Toplu inscription (Dittenberger, Sylloge², ii. 929) as enclosing the precinct of Dictaean Zeus, the more so as large blocks were visible on rising ground near the sea. It proved however to have been a τέμενος only in the Homeric sense of an enclosed estate. The excavation gave us the ground-plan of a Mycenaean farmstead, described in detail below (p. 329) by Mr Tod and Mr Dawkins.