In the spring of 1950 my wife and I took part in an archaeological dig at Cosa, on the Tuscan coast ninety miles above Rome. Anyone who has travelled by train in daylight on the coastal line to or from Genoa and the Riviera has seen the site: the great grey polygonal walls looming up as high as a four-story building on a 370-foot hill that rises out of the reclaimed swamp-lands of the Maremma. During the war the Fascists had built at Orbetello, the nearest town to Cosa, a dynamite factory which became the target of the air-photographers of our Strategic Bombing Command. These air photographs appeared to reveal on the hill of Malabarba, just inland from Cosa, the characteristic large mounds which mark the site of Etruscan tombs; these mounds, which later turned out, on prosaic terrestrial examination, to be sanddunes, were the bait which attracted the archaeologists of the American Academy in Rome to the site.