The Pennsylvania University Museum's Demeter and Persephone Sanctuary Project at Cyrene: A Final Progress Report?

Abstract

Trigeminated at more or less the same time as the First of September Revolution and the appearance of the first published report from The Society for Libyan Studies, the excavation phase of the extramural Sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone project at Cyrene ran until 1978 when it was stopped in order to begin work on final publication. The intervening years have seen a degree of progress, and this retrospective vicenary issue of Libyan Studies provides a welcome opportunity to take stock of what has been and is going on. The journal's readers will already have some familiarity with the broad outlines of the sanctuary project, since summary articles have been published in an earlier issue (White 1978) and elsewhere (Vickers and Reynolds 1972; Kane 1979; Humphrey 1980; White 1981). In addition reviews of the three published volumes of the final report (White 1984; Schaus 1985; Lowenstam et al. 1987) have appeared here with exemplary promptitude (Lloyd 1985; Boardman 1986; Fulford 1988), as well as externally (Brown 1986; Tomlinson 1986; Cook 1987). The present article's bibliographical citations list what has been written about the sanctuary, but omit the series of preliminary reports in Libya Antiqua (between Vols. 8 and 16) and American Journal of Archaeology (Vols. 78 and 80), whose inclusion would be redundant, as would be any attempt to minute the contents of the reviewed final study volumes. Instead my present intention is to give a short report on work in progress and to summarise the results of what has already been published in separate studies outside the framework of the final publication.

From Above and on the Ground: Geospatial Methods for Recording Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa

“…Subjectivity, inherent in many processes of archaeological interpretation, also needs to be taken into account and mitigated against using standardised terminologies. Cyrene's monuments were first recorded by travellers in the 18th and 19th centuries [58], with more extensive archaeological investigations over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries e.g., [59][60][61][62][63][64][65]. Cyrene developed from a Greek colony in the 7th-4th centuries BC, with occupation continuing through the Roman and Byzantine periods [66].…”