Sir R.E.M.Wheeler, the Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India, in the 1940s saw a few potsherds of Arikamedu site displayed in the Madras Museum, which he identified as ""terra sigillata"", or Arrentine ware, an expensive ceramic made until 50 CE in Arezzo, Italy. Thereafter, when he visited the Pondicherry Museum and saw more of the findings from the Arikamedu site, he was impressed and thought that he had found the links between the Classical Mediterranean and Ancient India. Soon thereafter in 1945, the penultimate year of World War II, he mounted excavations in a scientific manner. He was looking for an archaeological site in India that could establish its cultural link, a datum of the Indian antiquities to the Greco-Roman period, and this quest led him to the Arikamedu site. These excavations also involved Indian archaeologists, who were trained on the site.