The two supporting museums’ generous financial support was supplemented over the years by the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as a large number of supporting corporations and institutions listed elsewhere.1 Apart from these, there remain the many private individuals of conspicuous generosity who have volunteered to assist our work with financial help from its inception in 1969 down to the present day. While the contributions of nearly all of these are acknowledged in the usual but entirely inadequate way by listing their names in print, four persons have been omitted, entirely by my error. A familiar Latin bromide runs aliquando bonus dormitat Homerus or “Even the good Homer sometimes sleeps,” in other words, makes mistakes. Not to be confused on any level with Homer, I cannot begin to explain how their omissions occurred. The blameless victims of my appallingly bad memory are John and Sarah Price, whose names should have been added to the series’ first volume twenty-eight years ago, and Edward and Josephine Hueber, who were omitted from the 2007 LS article announcing the establishment of the Cyrenaican Archaeology Project. To them I can only offer another hopefully less fatuous aphorism: auctor pretiosa facit or something like “It is the giver who makes the gift precious.”
As to the many persons responsible for producing the fine photos, plans, sections, elevations, and drawings of the individual architectural frusta which have gone into the making of this book, I would simply like to redirect the reader’s attention to pp. xviii and xxvi of the prefaces of the first and fifth volumes, respectively, of this series, White 1984 and White 1993, to which I am now extremely pleased to be able to add the name of David Hopkins, who has drawn the restoration drawings of the S20 Propylaeum and the later sanctuary’s restoration which serves as the book’s endpapers. The volume would simply not exist without the creative imput of these talented colleagues.
In addition I thank Karen Vellucci for once more extending her friendship and editorial expertise to sort out the many problems in the text and illustrations created by me in my ignorance of computers and other related matters. I wish to salute my two anonymous external readers, who have demonstrated special diligence and exceptional intelligence in contributing their time and skills to improve the text’s quality. And I further wish to thank Jennifer Quick for applying her patience, hard work, and editorial expertise to bringing this book to a point where it could actually be published. This still leaves me, quite appropriately, with the full responsibility for all errors contained therein. Finally, to my peerless wife, Joan, who has put up with forty years of Libya madness, I can only offer my heartfelt appreciation, gratitude, and love.
Cohasset
Christmas 2008
P.S. As this volume was going to press, the sad word of David Hopkins’s premature and accidental death reached me.
1. White 1984, xvii–xviii; White 1993, xxv–xxvi.
Introduction
I first encountered Richard Goodchild 44 years ago on the beach of Marsa Susa where he laid out his conditions for licensing the University of Michigan to excavate Cyrene’s port city of Apollonia.2 This led to 17 years of fruitful collaboration between the University of Michigan’s Kelsey Museum of Ancient and Mediaeval Archaeology (succeeded in 1973 by the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology) and the Libyan Department of Antiquities until the Libyan authorities terminated the activities of the American mission in 1981. An interval of 23 years ensued before Susan Kane and I were invited to return to Tripoli in the summer of 2004. During our visit, Dr. Ali Khadouri, then president of the Libyan Department of Antiquities, issued us a license to return in 2005 to begin the remedial investigation of the sanctuary’s physical site and storerooms, and to initiate an expanded survey of the extramural grounds which lie to the immediate south, east, and west of the core sanctuary.
Under the fresh name of the Cyrenaican Archaeological Project, or CAP, the project was to be jointly sponsored by Oberlin College and the University of Pennsylvania Museum and directed by Susan Kane, with me as interim associate director. This ushered in a brief Prague spring in which funds were quickly raised in the United States to enable the Department of Antiquities to take up the much needed repairs of the large retaining wall separating the Middle from the Lower Sanctuary. It also allowed Kane to organize a joint Libyan-British survey team, the latter from the University of Birmingham led by Vincent Gaffney and Gareth Sears, in order to initiate in June 2006 survey work on CAP’s expanded concession.3 Since that time, however, the political momentum has unfortunately once again swung away from improved relations between Tripoli and Washington, which has had the effect of once again postponing resumption of work on the physical site and storage facilities. At this time, it remains uncertain when this will occur.
The changes which occurred in the course of so many years of enforced absence can be measured in different ways. When the actual digging ended in 1979, computers, digital imaging, laser survey instruments, ground penetrating radar, and the like had yet to reach Libya. Some may recall Julian Whittlesey’s then state-of-the-art “bipod” designed for vertical photography; ours did not make it out of the warehouse for lost and misplaced goods at the Benghazi airport before it was smashed. Aside from it, the expedition’s most exotic specimen of scientific equipment was an 8" by 10" Brobdignagian glass plate camera skillfully operated by our highly talented staff photographer, Nick Merrick. Efforts to stock and maintain a conservation laboratory during the 1970s were blocked with regularity by import regulations prohibiting the import of chemicals as basic as muriatic acid. The list could go on to serve no particular purpose. Today, archaeology has of course fundamentally changed in nearly every respect one can think of, and, halted when they were, the University of Pennsylvania Museum’s methods seem almost comically outdated, if not as obsolete as the dodo.
During the nearly three decades–long suspension of activity, it was impossible for any of the project’s team of research investigators to regain access to their materials. This has had a predictably negative impact on the orderly flow of publication. I was personally able to complete the first volume of the site’s final publication series during a 1980–1981 sabbatical year at Oxford.4 Blocked from returning to Cyrene after that, my next two decades were spent excavating and then publishing a Late Bronze Age island on the northwest coast of Egypt.5 After the second volume dealing with the sanctuary’s first 600 years of architectural and archaeological development appeared in 1993,6 two more monographs followed.7 But this still leaves the final studies by
S. Kane, E. Fabbricotti, and J. Uhlenbrock of the sculptures, lamps, and terracotta figurines to be accounted for. The site’s coarse wares were given to J. Riley who subsequently opted not to participate in the University of Pennsylvania Museum series.
What is left to be published remains central to the dating and interpretation of the sanctuary architecture’s Imperial period development, the central topic of this study. Fortunately, the dates of the individual objects selected for publication were communicated to me by the various authors for inclusion in the following sections dealing with context and date and will be footnoted where appropriate, with the exception of the coarse ware pottery for which a publisher remains to be named. The current volume presents a slightly different format from what was adapted for the Volume V study of the pre-Imperial period architectural development, but will use the same abbreviations to refer to the still pending studies.8
A second difference between the1984 and 1993 studies and the present text is the relatively smaller number of stratigraphical cross-sections accompanying the text. The reason for this is that the entire Lower Sanctuary area, together with the exterior footings of the Middle Sanctuary’s eastern peribolos wall, were not excavated in any depth. One of the goals of any future investigation of the site should be to clear north from the forward face of the T20 retaining wall to the wadi drain. It is worth repeating that it was along the drain that Ettore Ghislanzoni laid his Decauville railroad line prior to 1915 to facilitate the clearance of what he must have considered to be one of the site’s most promising areas.9