Letter from Schaeffer to Dikaios and Megaw on the joint mission, with analysis of Dikaios's excavation resultsClaude Frédéric-Armand Schaeffer

- 4 -

but he does not seem to contemplate the possibility that later sherds intrude into earlier levels, which may happen, especially when a building after a destruction is cleared, repaired and reused in a subsequent period, as in the case of the Main building contemporary of floor V.

In face of such fragile evidence, which allows interpretation of quite opposite signification, knowing that I date his matbuilding to the late Bronze Age, i.e. LC II, its precision even perhaps to LC I, as all the fine buildings of earlier masonry of the same level in the immediate neighbourhood of Dikaios' date, he must remember what he wrote to me during the date (30 May 1949): "Comme j'ai dit, j'ai touché les planches purement mycéniens avec de la céramique mycénienne et chypriote dessus. Très intéressant, car cela datera notre palais. Jusqu'ici j'ai touché le V ou VI° plancher successif et les quatre premières sont du LC III [handwritten: ✓] (done I à IV [handwritten: ✓] à l'exception de V et VI). He now concludes on a date which overthrows all the previous observations in the surrounding areas. Starting from a wrong stratigraphical interpretation, he should have listened to the witnesses of the contrary evidence from among the sherds in floor V, but instead, he persists in his interpretation and brushes away what is not agreeing to his opinion. Dikaios should know that a stratigraphical or chronological evidence is likely to be wrong when in disagreement with one single evidence found in the dig.

Moreover, he should know that any mistake of such a nature will inevitably be exposed by future research, and also that no obstination, even as solid as the Swedish one, can in the long run, obscure the true state of affairs and prevent it to be known.

He may listen therefore, to me with my experience of the site and of parallel sites of very similar nature and architecture as Ras Shamra, where I developed my stratigraphical experience during 20 years of work, and listen carefully when I say: Dikaios, I can assure you that you are wrong here: the hearth on floor V dates of the first period of the reuse of the main building and not of the period of its erection. Therefore the pottery of the hearth gives not the date of the building and of floor V, but only of the first of its subsequent utilisations which, as you rightly found out from floors IV to I, belong to LC III, i.e. to the immediate postmycenaean or earliest Iron Age period.

Please do not believe that I oppose your interpretation because it is contrary to what I published in Revue Arch., ASA, and Stratigraphie Comparée, etc.; I do not mind changing my mind for to me scientific truth dominates all other considerations. But I oppose your opinion because I know you are here on the wrong track, that your mistake, if maintained, will be exposed later on (I already have seen other mistakes being corrected on that site by new research) and because your work and mine would … continues