display in the Forum Antiquarium. In 1907 D. Vaglieri began excavations in the southwest corner of the Palatine which revealed cuttings in the rock. These were actually, though Vaglieri did not recognize them as such, cuttings for early Iron Age huts, the date being an inference from the artifacts, whose stratification Vaglieri did not record. After a sharp controversy with Pigorini (whose prestige, because of public interest in the _terremare_, was then at its height), the dig was suspended, leaving one but half-excavated. Here, in this intact area, excavations were resumed in 1948 by a younger specialist in the prehistoric archaeology of Italy, S. M. Puglisi. This time, the methods were rigorously scientific, and the cultural strata were observed and recorded with meticulous care. Puglisi recognized that a scientific dig requires the constant presence on the site during working hours of a competent archaeologist; no precise results can ever be obtained by an excavation director who visits his site only a couple of times a week, since unsupervised workmen can hardly be expected to respect levels of stratification, preserve the right artifacts, or keep accurate excavation notebooks, without which, of course, no scientifically valid conclusions can be drawn. In the area left undug by Vaglieri, Puglisi was able to distinguish five levels, which have been schematically reproduced on the walls of the Palatine Antiquarium. The top level consisted of nine feet of ancient dump. But the four levels beneath the dump amounted to six-and-a-half feet of compact, undisturbed strata, of which the bottom eight inches represented what had collected on the hut floor while it was still in use. Here the sherds were very tiny, for they had been walked on, it being the regular practice of Iron Age man--and woman--to live comfortably in the midst of their own debris. The hearth (one of the Dutch ovens was discovered in fragments _in situ_) was near the center of the hut, very close to a cutting for a central supporting post--the first evidence ever found for such construction. But there was no danger of setting the central post on fire, since the cooking flame was entirely enclosed within the clay of the oven. Bits of fallen wattle-and-daub revealed the wall-construction. There were animal bones and impasto sherds bearing the marks of fire, but none of the shiny black pottery called _bucchero_ (the best examples of which are rarely found in Rome in contexts earlier than 700 B.C.) and no painted ware. This level, then, belonged to the first phase of the Iron Age, dated, by parallels with the finds from beneath the Flavian Palace, about 800–700 B.C. (The traditional date of Rome’s founding is 753.) The lowest level being so shallow, and the sherds showing the marks of fire, the inference is that the hut had not been occupied very long before it was burned down.