Field Reports from the end of the 1998 Field Season DIRECTOR'S DIARY Gregory Warden, Director Part V: Thursday, July 23, 1998 I have once again procrastinated in writing this report. My excuse is the usual one, that new information was coming out of the trenches day by day, so that I had to wait until the final day of excavation, almost the final hour, to be able to provide new insight about our endeavors. Excavation, in any case, is now finally over. The crews are tired and looking forward to a free weekend before we begin to backfill the trenches on Monday. I will spend part of the weekend doing the final photography of the trenches. This is always a tricky job because the light on the poggio is difficult to work with--too much contrast and many heavy patches of shade among the bright sunny areas. By Wednesday, the backfilling should be over, and our students will head off to airports or summer travels while the staff work on mundane tasks such storage, inventories, and final reports. It has been an extraordinary season, both in terms of finds and information, much of which we have not had time to fully digest. We will publish a final report, probably in December. It is intended for a non-scholarly audience and will be available by mail order. Again, the published report will include a proper summary of our achievements and photographs of our major finds. The most important news is that we can document three phases of architecture and that we have determined with some certainty the plans of major buildings of the second and third phases. These buildings are very large rectangular structures, of similar plan. Their length is still to be determined, but their width is an impressive thirteen meters. In the third phase (4th-3rd century BC) another building seems to have been built further to the south. For the first time, we have solid evidence for the architectural layout of the site in all its phases, and we will be working hard this fall to produce preliminary reconstructions for a presentation at the annual meetings of the Archaeological Institute of America. I keep telling our students that we are not here to find things, but to find out about things. This refrain has by now become a cliché. Our students repeat it to me every time a new find of importance, a sherd of Greek pottery or an item of bronze, comes to light. We are lucky to have found some exceptional objects once again this year, but it really is true that the most rewarding result of our work has been the fact that we can begin the process of explaining what happened at Poggio Colla and in the Mugello between the seventh and third centuries BC. Field Reports from the end of the 1998 Field Season Units PC 1 & 13 Unit PC 6 Unit PC 8 Units PC 10 & 11 Unit PC 12 Unit PF 1 Conservator's Report See the 1998 Annual Report for the season summary by Professor Gregory Warden.