In the early Imperial Age, the steadily growing Christian movement was viewed with suspicion by both the authorities and the people of Rome; in the second century, the Roman rejection of Christian teachings, customs, and practices resulted in a most intriguing counter-movement. During this century, two types of negative response to the Christian faith had become established. The first encompasses the anti-Christian accusations circulating among the Roman population during most of the period, occasionally resulting in Christians being persecuted. At the end of the century, supplementary controversy arose from within the intellectual world. Those who engaged in this polemic were authors who had studied Christian customs, and who consequently targeted the substance of the Christian teachings.

Newly discovered photographs taken during the Qumran excavations in 1954, now available on the Palestine Exploration Fund website, can illuminate various problematic issues of the site's history. In this article aspects of Qumran are examined afresh with the aid of the data these photographs provide. The mud-brick, plastered 'blocks' of L.77 and L.86-L.87/L.89 have been interpreted in diverse ways by different Qumran researchers, but it is most likely that these features had different functions within each separate spatial context, since those of L.77 are much lower than those of L.86 and L.89. In a new photograph, the top of the central block in L.86 appears to have had a slight hollow. The blocks are not the bases for palm-log roof supports, since the fall of the burnt wood on the Period Ib floor in L.86 -now evidenced in a new photograph -indicates that the flat roofs at Qumran were constructed with beams running across the widths of rooms, with palm logs laid on top.

Documentation of the unpublished Greek-Dutch excavation in 1956 at Troullos -the eastern quarter of Archanes on the isle of Crete -was recently rediscovered and assembled. The slides, photographs, plans and notes, presented here for the first time, not only provide a vivid picture of the excavation that had fallen into oblivion, but also offer an interesting view of the methods and approaches of archaeology at the time, the ways of communication in the archaeological world and the circumstances in which campaigns were organised in the 1950s.

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