The Palace of Knossos

Abstract

As far as it was possible to forecast the Campaign of 1902 on the Palace site of Knossos it promised to be one of finishing up in a limited quarter of the East Slope, with some further delimitation of already fairly ascertained boundaries. But appearances were deceptive. Not only did the work of excavating the remainder of the deep-lying rooms of the Central part of this quarter prove to be of extraordinary difficulty, owing to the masses of heavy superstructures that it was necessary to support, but the building was found to extend further down the slope than the preliminary trial pits had led us to expect. In several cases these had just missed important walls, with the result that vast masses of excavated materials had, towards the close of the previous campaign, been dumped down in places from which they had this year to be removed at the cost of much labour. It was also found that several of the chambers previously excavated along the edge of the second East Slope Terrace—notably those near the Olive Press—overlaid basement areas containing important remains, and these, in turn, the floor levels of a still earlier Palace, covered with pottery of the pure ‘Kamáres’ class.