A great deal is being written about the methods of analysing data after it has been collected on an archaeological site; very little, however, has been said about the methods by which the data is retrieved. It may be that the two are not really separate.

Since the appearance of Archaeology from the Earth in 1954, further development of the excavation methods there propounded by Sir Mortimer Wheeler has been neglected. Too often, it seems, excavation techniques are assumed to be ‘scientific’ because of a resemblance, chance or not, to something advocated in that basic and fundamental work. It is the intention here to suggest that there are retrieval techniques which might, with advantage, be used alongside the very high standard, advanced by Wheeler, of excavation by soil-stratification. The experiment described below is one of several which are, at present, being developed to meet the problems of archaeological recovery techniques.

Early in 1970 David French asked me to try to find a solution to the problem of dealing with the large amount of very fine material which passed through his new archaeological sieving and flotation processes. The material was in fact graded from fine sand through silt to clay, and came from the end of the flotation boxes mixed with quantities of water. The resulting mud or slime then blocked up filters and overflows. Apart from the suspicion that one was thus missing very fine particles of archaeological interest, the discarded slime was slowing up and even threatening to stop the flotation processes.

The problem was thus one of separating quantities of very fine material from large quantities of water, and at the same time of separating fine organic material from particles of inorganic material–usually silicates.

In Anatolian Studies, Vol. XIII, 1963, there appeared I. McNeill's “The Metre of the Hittite Epic”, known here as MHE. Some implications of MHE are explored below with regard to sentence stress in Hittite.

In MHE Mr. McNeill shows that the Hittite Song of Ullikummi has a stress-based metre, and that it is built up of verses, each with four stresses and divided into two equal cola. This system accords with those of the Mesopotamian antecedents of the Hittite epic-mythological genre. MHE's prime interest is in the parallels between the Hittite and the Homeric epic forms, and in particular in the use made by each of set formulae such as are suited to oral composition.

A large part of MHE explores the variations found in the Hittite formulae. A basic formula is exemplified by Aas siunas memiskiwan dais “Ea began to speak to the gods”. Each word is stressed, and the clause fills a whole verse.

The opportunity to study the early farming population at Çatal Hüyük came to me through the foresight and kindness of the excavator, Mr. James Mellaart, and the successive Directors of the British Archaeological Institute Mr. Michael Gough and Dr. David French. I am most grateful to them for the opportunity to publish this report. In the autumn of 1967 I worked in collaboration with Dr. Denise Ferembach of the CNRS in Paris, who is reporting on the morphology and geographic relations of the population. We worked in the laboratory of Professor Enver Bostancı, head of the department of Palaeoanthropology at the University of Ankara, who most kindly aided us and allowed us facilities for study. The successive Directors General of Antiquities and Museums, Bay Mehmet Önder and Bay Hikmet Gürçay, also gave us permission to study this material and expressed gracious interest in it.

This article is based on material collected by Charles Burney, who carried out a survey of the province of Tokat and the northern part of the Sivas province in 1955. His aim was to study the pre-Classical remains of the area and pottery from the Chalcolithic period to the Iron Age was collected. This study is concerned with the Iron Age.

My aims were firstly to record the pottery found, including the plain wares, and to plot any distinguishable groups. I wanted to look for parallels outside the area, establish the direction of any outside influence and then to test the pottery groups against physical boundaries and consider their relationship, if any, to known political boundaries. Any conclusions must be seen in the light of the extremely limited material available.

An inscription giving the name of this otherwise unknown community was discovered by J. R. S. Sterrett in the West Taurus Lake District, during his 1885 Wolfe Expedition, in the large village of Ortakaraviran, which lies north-east of Suğla Gölü (the ancient Trogitis lacus), on low ground close to the Lake.

The text of the inscription records that:

This white marble slab was cut into its present shape when the verso was incised for use as a decorative panel. An unknown amount of text is therefore missing on all sides, while a few spots in the middle make for difficult reading because of patches of mortar and some pick marks, notably in the first two lines. I am unable to guess at the original length of line, other than to say that it was considerably longer than what is preserved here.

Height, 0·24 m.; width, 0·187 m; thickness, 0·043 m.

Height of letters, 0·011–0·014 m.

At some time between 1960 and 1964, this inscription was brought to the Castle of St. Peter in Bodrum, which has in recent years doubled as the Bodrum Museum under the wise and careful supervision of Director Halık Elbe. Unfortunately, no one today knows who brought the stone in, or where it had been found, for the Museum fell heir to a vast store of material of archaeological value before any system of cataloguing could be devised.

Leon de Laborde's visit to Alahan in 1826 provided the earliest western account of the monastery complex that is now so closely associated with the work of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara through the excavations conducted by Michael Gough. Laborde was not, however, the first of the modern visitors. He was preceded by the indefatigable Evliya Çelebi, who visited the site in 1671–1672, while on his way to Mecca for the pilgrimage. Evliya followed more or less the course of the modern highway from Karaman to Mut, and I give below the full account of his journey between these two stations. Of the two primary authorities for the text, I have used MS. Pertev Pş 462, f. 68a as my chief source, with supplements from MS. Beşir Aǧa 452, f. 68a (a fuller, but less scrupulous, and on the whole less intelligent copy). The two copies vary more than is normally to be expected. The lost exemplar may have become increasingly unclear in the final two volumes, and the copyists were probably tiring of their monumental task. In the 1935 modernization of Seyahatname, Vol. IX, the passage occurs on pages 315–316.