rank were investigated at Palaikastro in eastern Crete and Thermi on the island of Lesbos. All of these sites except Thermi have seen recent British work—Knossos and Mycenae intermittently ever since the British connection was established.

That concentrated direction of effort has no counterpart in the activities of the other foreign missions, whose work in Greece either preceded the British (France, Germany, the United States) or followed it fairly soon afterward (Italy, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, and more recently, a number of other countries in Europe and the British Commonwealth), nor in the activities of the Greeks themselves. Such a long-standing tradition calls for some specific explanation, and there is a hint of one in the early British preoccupation with prehistory noted earlier, in which case its roots lie very deep indeed and this will not be the last illustration of it. Meanwhile, we should note the early and lasting involvement of the Athens school in Cypriot archaeology, which lasted through and beyond the British occupation of that island between 1878 and 1960.

For the other nations involved in Greek archaeology, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the time of the great sanctuary projects (i.e., major centers of religion) with their uniquely rich yields of works of art. The German operations at Olympia, long postponed, began in 1875. The equally continuous French connection with Delphi dates from 1894, and their connection with Delos began in 1904. The Greeks began a systematic exploration of the preclassical levels on the Athenian Acropolis in 1882, the Americans began work at the Argive Heraion in 1894, and the Danes started at Lindos in 1904. Other major long-term undertakings followed later. The only partial British counterparts were the much briefer campaigns at the Artemision of ephesus in 1904–1905 and at the Artemis Orthia sanctuary at Sparta between 1906 and 1910. There was no return to either site, and almost the only major British excavation of a classical Greek settlement to date has been that at Megalopolis (1890–1893).

There thus arose a most fundamental divergence between the implicit aims behind the setting up of a permanent British school in Greece and its main outcome. Art and connoisseurship, even at the end of the nineteenth century, were still uppermost in the minds of those who had encouraged the venture, and they were to be the justification and reward for involvement in Greek archaeology. In the account of a great meeting, primarily for the purpose of fund-raising, that the Athens school persuaded the Prince of Wales to chair at St. James’s Palace in 1895, it is the artists who stand out from the dazzling list of dignitaries present—Leighton, Millais, Poynter, Alma-Tadema, and other members of the Royal Academy who are now forgotten. The interest is clear, and it was indeed to be satisfied, but in a different way and by scholars who had little connection with fieldwork or the new school. Throughout the twentieth century, the mantle of Hamilton was worn, with varying degrees of distinction, by British students of Greek painted pottery and, more intermittently, of Greek sculpture and architecture. Their achievement, in this as in other branches of classical studies, was steadily eclipsed by German scholars until the heyday of the greatest of these scholars, Adolf Furtwängler, in the final decade of the century.

But an era of British resurgence was eventually to dawn. By applying to Greek pottery methods first developed in the study of Renaissance painting, j.d. beazley (1885–1970), the greatest of all students of vase painting, transformed the subject itself and gave it a place in the main discourse of art history. Single-handedly, he attributed many thousands of vases to individual painters for the first time, providing a substitute for the lost masterpieces of the great names in Greek sculpture, which, as was only now becoming clear, were in the vast majority of cases lost forever. He thereby gave a further lease on life to another branch of classical archaeology—one that, for all the discoveries in Aegean prehistory, remains closer to the heart of the subject in public perception. He was also important in founding a following whose work extended across a wide field of Greek art. His two successors in the Lincoln Chair at Oxford, Bernard Ashmole (1894– 1989) and Martin Robertson (1914–), were