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No historian of Africa can be indifferent to the fact that alone in Africa south of the Sahara the East African coast possesses a link between history and archaeology in its own medieval mints and also in coins imported from other lands during the past two thousand years. Its history is poorly documented, and its archaeology is still to a great extent in the stage of record and survey; the numerous finds of Chinese porcelain and other imported ceramics can at present only be assigned within a bracket of at smallest fifty years: but in the coin finds there is a key for the future establishment of a precise chronology for all of these.

In 1972 Fr Charles Coüasnon, O.P., gave the Schweich Lectures to the British Academy on this subject. As consultant architect to the restoration work he seemed well qualified to do so. But work continued until 1980, and it was not until 1982 that Fr Virgilio Corbo, O.F.M., published a definitive account of the work, Il Santo Sepolcro di Gerusalemme, in three handsome volumes. I did not succeed in obtaining a copy until 1984. Thus it was not surprising that Canon Ronald Brownrigg's Come, See the Place: the ideal companion for all travellers to the Holy Land, 1985, still treats Fr Couasnon as having had the last word, and prints plans some of which are erroneous. Only since then has an article in Le Monde de la Bible, Mars-Avril, Paris, 1984, no.33, in a number devoted entirely to the Holy Sepulchre, by Fr Florentino Dfez Fernandez, O.S.A.,3 reached me, describing in a summary form his excavations for the Greek Orthodox Community on the site of Golgotha, and for the Armenian Community behind the Crusader Chapel of St Helena. A definitive account of his work is eagerly awaited, for his work adds to our knowledge and corrects some previous misconceptions of the chronology of the site.