A village of 16 houses remained on the ridge, but the vestiges of fortification walls indicated a city had once existed there. A half-century later, after removing the houses, Federico Halbherr and his crew began to discover the remains of an extensive palace complex. As he had begun excavation before Arthur Evans at Knossos in 1900, he did not have the advantage of Evans' concepts of Minoan civilization nor the knowledge acquired after the decipherment of the Linear B syllabary by Michael Ventris. Excavation ended in 1904, to begin again after another half-century, in 1950. By this time it was understood that the palace had been constructed at the beginning of the Proto-Palace Period. After 1955 the place name, , "pa-i-to", interpreted as "Phaistos" (written in Mycenaean Greek), began to turn up in the Linear B tablets at Knossos, then under the Mycenaean Greeks. There was every reason to think that "pa-i-to" was located at Kastri.