Knossos, because of its size and location, as well as Mackenzie's careful excavation practices, remains the most important Minoan site.

ECONOMIST: Bullshot

By comparison with the crypts, staircases and pillared halls of Knossos, the other half-dozen Minoan palaces that have been excavated around Crete are dull ground-plans in stone.

ECONOMIST: Bullshot

During the political upheavals on Crete that led to the island becoming part of the modern Greek state, Evans's position as a landowner helped ensure Knossos remained free from encroachment.

ECONOMIST: Bullshot

The day he appeared in court, the Times reported that he had transferred ownership of his estate at Knossos, including his vineyards and the Villa Ariadne, to the Athens-based British archaeological institute: an unexpected act of generosity that Mr MacGillivray argues was intended to save his reputation.

ECONOMIST: Bullshot

He exposes in print what clubby archaeologists from Oxford and Cambridge have long known but kept to themselves: that Evans was a mediocre field archaeologist, who relied on his skilled, hard-drinking assistant, Duncan Mackenzie, to manage the Cretan workmen and build a chronology for the different phases of occupation and destruction at Knossos.

ECONOMIST: Bullshot

Knossos's enduring fascination derives as much from Evans's bold restoration of the palace, the centre of Europe's first urban civilisation, as from the raunchy legend of the Minotaur, the monstrous offspring of Queen Pasiphae's affair with a bull, who was shut up at Knossos in a labyrinth built by Daedalus, an early technological whizz.

ECONOMIST: Bullshot

Although archaeoseismology (the study of ancient earthquakes through indicators left in the archaeological record) has a lineage that extends back to the pioneering excavations of Schliemann at Troy, Evans at Knossos and Schaeffer at Ugarit in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it is essentially a young and burgeoning discipline that has met with much reservation from some earthquake scientists.

UNESCO: Tales set in Stone: learning from ancient earthquakes