Levels Taken on the Nike Bastion

T HE SCHOLARSHIP on the Akropolis of Athens is the most extensive, intricate, and potentially confusing of that for any site in Greece. This is owing partly to the intricacies of the site itself, whose stages extend from the Bronze Age through the Classical period to the Turkish occupation. Just as daunting, however, is a long and varied history of excavation. Much of the site was excavated in the 19th century, when scientific archaeology was in its infancy, and a good portion of more recent work has remained partly or wholly unpublished. My recent study of the Sanctuary of Athena Nike brought me face to face with these problems.' The encounter makes me all the more appreciative of how James Wright negotiates similar obstacles in his article on the Mycenaean entrance at the west side of the Akropolis, published in the 1994 volume of this journal.2 Wright and I have shared an interest in the Nike Bastion for many years and have talked back and forth on a number of points as work progressed. On one knotty problem we have long disagreed: the original height of the Mycenaean bastion. My study follows Iakovidis and Travlos in positing a gate wall northeast of the Mycenaean Nike Bastion; the original height of the bastion thus comes to 144.0 m. or more above sea level.3 Wright does away with a gate wall and restores a freestanding tower at the west end of the bastion. His tower is of indeterminate height; the top of his bastion at the east comes to ca. +141.0 or+141.5 m.4 More important than this disagreement are other points, points for which there is more extant evidence, on which we agree. His reexamination of the remains beneath the Pinakotheke leaves me convinced that there was indeed a Mycenaean terrace on the site,5 while he concurs with me in seeing the upper stonework of the bastion as a post-Mycenaean repair.6 Anyone who reads Wright's study and mine carefully is bound to compare not only our conclusions but also our plans and drawings, and this calls for special comment. In 1979 Wright and William Dinsmoor, Jr., took an extensive set of levels on the bastion; these are recorded on three drawings that Wright publishes as figures 1, 3, and 5: section b-b'. I regret that I first saw these drawings only in the finished publication: my researches on the bastion in 1982/83 and detailed study of archival drawings from the original excavation of the early bastion, many of which I published in 1993, cast doubt on these levels and, in some cases, show them to be in error. Although the differences are often considerable,