Recent excavations at the Greco-Libyan site of Euesperides, Benghazi, have included a sampling programme for the retrieval of macroscopic plant remains. Preliminary results are now available and help to shed some light on the economy of the site between the sixth and the third centuries BC. Barley is the principal cereal crop recorded, while both hulled and free-threshing wheats are present. Fruit remains generally dominate the samples and include frequent seeds of grape and fig. The grape pips are of interest in that they appear to be morphologically more wild than cultivated. It is thought that they may be of a variety which does not conform with the characteristics of better known northern Mediterranean varieties of grape.

Aspects of the geographical setting of Tobruk, the ancient Antipyrgos, are discussed as a context for the publication of a limestone statuette of a horse and rider found in 1991 at Bir el Jeser. Stylistically difficult to date, it is probably of the later Hellenistic or Roman periods.

This report summarises the aims and methods of the Fezzan Project, a new interdisciplinary investigation of human settlement in the Saharan environment of southern Libya. The work follows up earlier British work by Charles Daniels on the Garamantes and focuses on the Wadi el-Agial in the vicinity of Germa (ancient Garama). The time frame of the project is the last 12,000 years. A variety of methodologies has been employed, including topographic survey, standing building recording, excavation, field walking, palaeobotanical and faunal sampling, geophysics and human bone analysis.

A stone for tethering animals was noted on the track from Ghadamis to Al Awaynat, about 50 km SSE of Ghadamis, and is reported here, together with a group of hearths.

The Libyan Department of Antiquities has begun to investigate the many chamber tombs cut into the rock scarps surrounding the oasis of Jeghbub (=Jarabub/Gerabub). Some notice of this work was given at the Congress of Cyrenaican Studies in Rome (1996) by the Director of the Department. This communication called to mind a visit to Jeghbub made more than forty years ago. The visit afforded occasion for a brief investigation of these tombs, which because of a mischance has hitherto not been recorded. In view of the renewed concern with them it may now be opportune at least to put on record some surviving impressions of these tombs, mentioning unlooked for contents and their background.

The third season of excavation of a Roman town house adjacent to the theatre of Lepcis Magna took place in September 1996. The whole ground plan of the house had not previously been exposed and this was the primary task of the 1996 fieldwork. It appeared that the first building was constructed of well-dressed stone with interior mud-brick walls in the first half of the first century AD and continued in use until either the later first or the beginning of the second century AD. The site was then abandoned until the fourth century when the building was reoccupied, and the interior layout changed. Final abandonment seems to have taken place in the fifth century. The cisterns and well of the house were also examined, and probably what are the first waterlogged archaeological deposits from North Africa were sampled. They include large amounts of organic domestic waste.

Ceramic assemblages of late coarseware and first-century coarse and fineware were studied by Isabella Welsby Sjöström and Paul Reynolds. Sally-Ann Ashton worked on the wall-plaster, architectural marble fragments, and other finds, including ivory and bone, bronzes, and sculpture. The animal bone of all three seasons was examined by Jane Sidell, and included much butchered material. Sheep/goat were the most common animal found, and cattle and pig were a great deal more common than had been expected for North Africa. Keith Wilkinson discusses the palaeoenvironmental material and future hopes for its scientific examination.

During 1997 a Lepcis Magna web site has been opened to provide up to date news of the project. A virtual museum provides illustrations of many of the important finds, and an illustrated account of the excavation can be heard in the virtual lecture theatre. Its address is: www.alnpete.co.uk/lepcis/.