These other huts confirm the other archaeological data, which show that what later was unified into urban Rome was originally a group of simple hut-villages clustered on various hills, the Forum huts having spilled down, as it were, from the village on the Palatine. The huts in the level just above the Forum necropolis represent a still earlier stage of this spillover; they antedate the earliest huts in Gjerstad’s twenty-nine levels. By the date of Gjerstad’s earliest pebble pavements, the huts in the necropolis area have been replaced by a more developed domestic architecture, perhaps with rooms opening on a central court. These houses have rectangular plans, mud-brick, wood-braced walls, and tufa foundations. At the spillover stage, the villagers from the various hills formed some kind of confederation symbolized archaeologically by the two types of graves in the Forum necropolis, and in literature by the tradition of the joint religious festival called the Septimontium. The period of the first pebble pavement (575 B.C.) is one of major change, from village to urban life, to a city now for the first time boasting a civic center, destined to become the world’s most famous public square, the Roman Forum. Of the same date are the earliest remains on the Capitoline Hill, which was to be the _arx_ or citadel of historic Rome. Of the same date are the earliest artifacts from the Regia, which later generations revered as the palace of the kings. Of the same date is a sophisticated phase of the round shrine of Vesta, which encircled the sacred flame, symbol of the city’s continuity. The literary tradition would date the last two earlier, at least to Numa’s reign. However no architectural remains have so far been discovered which associate them with the earlier date. In his interpretation of the archaeological evidence about the date of the beginning of the Roman Republic, Gjerstad is just as iconoclastic as about the dating of the kings. His argument, more ingenious than convincing, is that an event as important politically as a change from a monarchy to a republic should be reflected in the artifacts, changing from richer to poorer, whereas no such objective evidence of a cultural break is visible in the levels dated by him (perhaps more closely than the facts warrant) at 509 B.C. Such a cultural break does not come until some fifty years later, when Etruscan imports cease. There are grave difficulties in pushing the date of the Roman Republic’s beginning down so far, of which the chief is a list (the _Fasti_) of pairs of consuls 509–450 B.C. where many names are too obscure to have been invented. Gjerstad’s excavation, in sum, is important as confirming the accuracy of Boni’s methods, and as telling us much about the village stage of Rome, but the absolute chronology cannot be said to be as yet firmly fixed, nor the traditional one definitely upset. * * * * *