Word: daybook
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...this year he went to Oxford's Ashmolean Museum, of which Sir Arthur had been director, and asked to see his notes. The librarian took him to a basement cupboard where most of the Evans papers were stored. Digging deep, he came upon a ten-volume, richly illustrated daybook giving a meticulous play-by-play account of Sir Arthur's excavation of Knossos. It was written by Duncan Mackenzie, a redhaired Scotsman whom Sir Arthur had hired as his assistant...
...Floor. Here was treasure indeed. Professor Palmer delved into the daybook, soon found an item that raised his academic hackles. According to Sir Arthur, the great palace at Knossos was destroyed about 1400 B.C. After that date it was occupied and partially rebuilt by "squatters" from the mainland, whose culture was far below the true Cretan level. The theory depended on Sir Arthur's claim that he found jars of squatter type in a room whose clay floor covered tablets written in Cretan script. This proved, he said, that early, literate Cretans had been superseded by comparatively crude invaders...
Palmer explained that he does not accuse Sir Arthur of deliberate misrepresentation, only of the self-deception of old age. But he still insists that the evidence of Duncan Mackenzie's daybook is plain for all to see. It shows, he says, that the Cretans of 1400 B.C. must have got their culture from the Greek mainland. That culture did not die, as Sir Arthur claimed, when the mainlanders came to Crete...