The 1971 Expedition was in the field for almost a month over Easter, thanks to the continued kindness and good will of the Libyan Department of Antiquities, and further generous financial support from the British Academy, the Seven Pillars of Wisdom Trust, the Society for Libyan Studies and the University of Newcastle.

The site of Saniat Gebril lies 300 yards east of the abandoned mud-brick town of Germa. Trial trenching (1965) and surface sherding had shown that at least 5 acres of compact settlement existed there, with the strong likelihood that more sparsely-placed buildings stretched as far as Germa. From the previous work it was thought that the main settlement consisted of a series of smallish mud-brick buildings, occupied from the late-first century A.D. until the early-third century, when the site was abandoned and not subsequently re-occupied.

The military administration which controlled what was known formerly as Tripolitania and Cyrenaica showed considerable initiative in preparing publications which still have great value in presenting statistical and other background data of a precision comparable with and sometimes better than more recent work.

Duncan Cumming (now Sir Duncan Cumming and the President of the Society for Libyan Studies) came from the Sudan administration with considerable Middle Eastern experience, a knowledge of Arabic and a sensitivity for the Islamic way of life, to run the military administration in Cyrenaica. He had the good fortune to find amongst his staff a number of technical specialists and scholars whom he stimulated to write and publish an excellent introductory account of the eastern part of Libya. This Handbook of Cyrenaica (1944–47) includes sections on the physical character of the area with a summary of geological knowledge based mainly on Italian sources, by O. H. Little, as well as sections outlining the history of Cyrenaica by the editor, and a sociological contribution by E. E. Evans-Pritchard (now Professor Evans-Pritchard) in Habitat and Way of Life—Tribes and Their Divisions. The work carried out in preparing the latter was to prove the basis of much more important and comprehensive studies by Evans-Pritchard. The Sanusiya Order was treated by C. C. Adams in the handbook, which also contained probably the only published account in English of the period of Italian colonization in eastern Libya, compiled by D. H. Weir, as well as a description of the famous southern oasis and shrine of Kufra by K. D. Bell.

In the following tour d'horizon I will try to indicate some of the main achievements of prehistoric research in Libya together with some of the ways in which they have been amplified by work in nearby regions. Finally I shall try to suggest some of the more promising avenues of future enquiry, as I see them.

In 1947 when R. W. Hey, William Watson, and I set out on our first field expedition to Libya the picture was very different from that which would form the background to such an undertaking today. No physical methods of time measurement of any kind were available, nor was there any serious estimate of the total chronological framework of the Ice Age or of human evolution as such. As to the situation in neighbouring territories, Dr. Gaton Thompson will I hope forgive me if I describe the then state of research in Egypt as sketchy and incomplete to a degree, while the position in the Maghreb despite the pioneering efforts of R. Vaufrey and E. G. Gobert was still marked by immense gaps and uncertainties. In Libya itself we knew of only a single excavated site, Hagfet et-Tera near Benghazi dug by C. T. Petrocchi during the early war years.