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The statuette of a centaur at Plates 8–9 was found during excavations at Lefkandi in Euboea, conducted by the British School at Athens during last summer. Standing 36 centimetres high, it is among the earliest representations of a centaur yet known from the Aegean area, and the largest of terracotta centaurs. Its outstanding interest seemed to the authors to call for a more detailed publication than the normal brief preliminary account of the excavation and its finds.It has an unusual archaeological history, suggesting that it was a valued object before it was eventually buried in a cemetery at Lefkandi. This cemetery, which lies on a small hill called Toumba, overlooking the modern fishing village of Lefkandi, was an unexpected discovery. Trials were made during 1969 in this vicinity in the hope of finding the Submycenaean and Early Protogeometric settlement which went with the nearby cist graves. The virtual absence of remains of this period on the main town site of ‘Xeropolis’ had led to the belief that at this time the inhabitants may have temporarily moved to the Toumba area, a smaller and more easily defensible hill and one with a natural supply of water. However, our trial there found not the settlement we hoped for, but another cemetery.

During the last forty years relatively few attempts have been made to define and describe that style of pottery known as Protogeometric. Following S. Wide's article on the Salamis graves, in which he identified the pottery associated with them as belonging to a new style, came B. Schweitzer's most valuable treatise in 1917, in which an attempt was made to bring together the whole of our knowledge up till that time. After 1917 little appeared until T. C. Skeat's The Dorians in Archaeology, published in 1932, in which the writer demonstrated the ‘excessive hospitality’ of Schweitzer's list of Protogeometric graves, and put forward the theory that the style originated in the North of Greece.

This cist tomb was uncovered in 1959 during the excavation of the House of Sphinxes,2 and it lay at a distance of only 2 m. from tomb PG 606 (see fig. I and BSA li. 114 fig. 5).It was built on the rock where there was a natural angle and a fairly sharp slope from west to east. The floor of the tomb was in fact for the most part the rock itself, but at the east end a number of small stones, overlying Mycenaean debris, were used. It was of rectangular shape, and orientated W.-E. The west and south walls of the tomb were provided by the rock; two large worked slabs, set upright, formed the north-east corner, and for the rest natural stones were used to line the tomb. There was no evidence of any roofing slabs, nor can one see how such could have been fixed. The inner dimensions were 1·78 × 0·68 m., and the two walling slabs had a height of 0·60 m.

(1968). Sir Arthur Evans' Knossos Fresco Atlas. By Mark Cameron and Sinclair Hood. Archaeological Journal: Vol. 125, No. 1, pp. 380-381.