The pottery from the John Ward - Perkins excavations at Lepcis Magna

Abstract

The primary aim of this thesis was to carry out the post excavation work for the archaeological excavations carried out at Lepcis Magna in 1951. Concurrently with their excavations at Lepcis Magna the British School at Rome also undertook excavations at Sabratha between 1948 and 1951 under the leadership of J.B. Ward-Perkins and Dame Kathleen Kenyon. The post-excavation work on Sabratha has now been completed and published (Kenrick 1986; Dore & Keay 1989 and Fulford & Tomber 1994). This present thesis will complement this work and that which has already been carried out at other key Mediterranean sites such as Carthage, Benghazi and in the UNESCO Libyan Valleys Survey.

The Tripolitanian town of Lepcis Magna is relatively famous for its surviving monumental architecture, but, in contrast, very little has been written about the economy of the town. Details of the surviving archive from the 1951 Lepcis Magna excavation are presented in chapter 3 and the redrawn section drawings can be found in appendix 10. A selection of pottery drawings can be found in chapter 5 and the pottery fabric descriptions in appendix 9. After the pottery had been categorized, identified, quantified and cross-referenced (wherever possible), typological descriptions were written. The analysis of the Lepcis Magna coarsewares was particularly important to this thesis as this was the first time that many of the vessels had been catalogued and typologies created for them. The assemblage was also examined statistically to see whether there was anything unusual about the way the pottery was deposited across the town and also analysed to show how the supply of pottery changed through time and from which parts of the Empire it was imported.

Aspects of the pottery assemblages from Lepcis Magna and Sabratha were compared in order to see whether there were any similarities or marked differences between them. Both towns had Punic foundations and Sabratha, tike Lepcis Magna, was a port on the Mediterranean coast as well as being on the trans-Saharan caravan route to the Fezzan. Given these factors one might expect some similarities in their pottery assemblages. Similarly, aspects of the pottery assemblages from Lepcis Magna and ULVS were studied in order to see whether there were any similarities or marked differences between them.

The thesis concluded with deductions about the nature of the economy of the Roman Tripolitanian town of Lepcis Magna based on the analysis of the pottery recovered during the John Ward - Perkins 1951 excavations; such an analysis has not previously been undertaken and published.

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