Modern man, digging up the past, a towns destruction, and all the furniture and household objects still in their places as the owners left them when they fled from the disaster. Surface signs, ashes and broken brickwork of a logical theory.

Division of labour: the difficulty is to combine this necessary work of details with the supervision and recording of what is going on in all other parts of the field. The first trench, by finding the whereabout of buildings: walls, false walls, of brick or of beaten earth, floors, rebuilt twice, Greece, Palestine, Syria, Egypt.

Dating evidence: inscriptions on walls, ground plans, utilising the evidence, having transferred this to paper we could proceed to the next part of our task: comparison of houses. In a certain number of houses (not in all) there was one room, which always presented the same features. Model village for workmen, a workmen’s village to improve his surroundings or to express his piety thirty-three centuries ago.

Digging up a blank page and supplementing written records testifies the need to observe objects in their original place. The use of material where inscribed documents are found, the history produced by digging may be extraordinarily detailed. Internal evidence, assumption and analysis, team work for the building up of history.