Sellopoulo is a small village, on the east bank of the river Kairetos, less than 2 kilometres north of Knossos. The fields immediately bordering the stream are fairly flat but the land soon rises in a series of step-like hills. Here surface soil is thin and the rock immediately underlying it is mostly the local kouskouras, a soft limestone easily cut. The geology of the region is, then, very suitable for chamber tombs. Indeed, the extensive Zafer Papoura cemetery, excavated by Evans, is on the west slope above the river, almost exactly opposite the tombs we shall be considering.Hogarth was the first to excavate at Sellopoulo. In 1900, in low-lying ground on the southwest edge of the village, he found what he describes as a ‘tholus tomb built of small stones’ in which were ‘three rudely painted chest urns standing side by side, all rifled in antiquity’. This tomb can no longer be seen.

The gaps in our knowledge of Bronze Age Euboea are so serious as to amount in some areas to a total blank. This is equally true of the periods immediately preceding and following the Bronze Age and has been commented on by a number of writers concerned with regional surveys. There remains a marked disparity between the state of our information and both the importance suggested by literary tradition and the archaeological potential of so well-placed and fertile an island.

The first excavations at Palaikastro, undertaken in the years 1902–6 by Bosanquet, Dawkins, and others, coincided with the first great period of research and discovery in Minoan Crete. They ran concurrently with Evans's early seasons at Knossos and with Hogarth's work at Zakro, not far from Palaikastro, and were in a true sense pioneer work. The series of reports which appeared in the Annual from 1901/2–1905/6, together with the later supplementary volume of Unpublished Objects and two final articles prepared for publication by various hands, built up a systematic and clear picture of one of the largest and perhaps the best preserved Minoan settlement yet excavated in Crete.The work was undertaken on a major scale, in the third season employing up to seventy workmen for nearly three months. It produced evidence for occupation in the area from the Neolithic to the end of the Late Minoan period, with a continuing cult of Dictaean Zeus from Geometric down to Hellenistic and Roman times. In addition some careful anthropological work was done, and the phases of occupation were tied in with those of the other Minoan sites known at the time.

The large island of Euboea, which lies along the north coast of Attica and Boeotia, was little known archaeologically until recent years (FIG. 1). Nor, apart from its involvement in the Persian Wars, then as a victim of Athenian imperialism and later as a step in the expansionism of Philip of Macedon, does it play any prominent role in the accounts of ancient historians. Yet, they have left hints of its former greatness in an early period of which little was remembered. The island was known to have sent out the first colonies to Italy and Sicily in the eighth century BC and to have settled the region of North Greece, still known as Chalcidice, after the name of one of Euboea's main cities, Chalcis. They remembered something, too, of a war between Chalcis and Eretria, the other major city of the island, in which their respective allies took part, and it is this conflict which seems to have exhausted both sides and led to the eclipse of the island's pre-eminence.

Summary A recently discovered burial in the Toumba Cemetery at Lefkandi, Euboea, differs from others previously found there in the shape of the tomb and the method of burial, which is a cremation contained in a bronze cauldron. The offerings, which include a sword, spearhead and iron arrowheads, make it certain that it is the burial of a warrior, but others, such as a series of stone weights, a N. Syrian cylinder seal and vases from Cyprus and Phoenicia indicate that he was a trader as well. In this preliminary acount, these and other aspects of the burial are considered.