Apollonia's East Fort, set on a promontory overlooking the sea east of the walled town, is part of a series of outlying fortresses guarding access to the port and Cyrene. Excavated by the University of Michigan in 1967, the fort is dated by coins and pottery to the second half of the fourth or first quarter of the third century BC. A striking design feature is its use of cut-down bedrock for the lower wall levels. The same technique is employed for Cyrene's Hellenistic defensive curtain north of the Caravanserai and later in the construction of Roman-period Gasr el-Haneia. It is furthermore utilised in a fairly broad range of tombs and cultic monuments throughout the province. Traceable as far back as the Neolithic period, rupestrian architecture first appears in Egypt by the Middle Kingdom. Between c. 1000 and 500 BC it spreads from thence to Syro-Palestine, western Asia Minor, Urartu and eventually as far east as India. Rather than owing its deployment in Cyrenaica to the building traditions of Egypt, it is more likely the result of the region's second wave of colonists arriving from Asia Minor c. 580 BC, given that Cyrene's Archaic rock-cut tombs bear comparison with the contemporary tomb architecture of SW Turkey.

The fortifications of the Hellenistic and Roman city of Tocra are over 2 km long (including the sea-wall) and comprise a curtain wall up to 2 m wide flanked by 31 rectangular towers. Three main structural phases were noted in the survey carried out in 1966 by David Smith: (1) Hellenistic walls of isodomic ashlar, (2) later Hellenistic work of isodomic ashlar with bevelled edges, associated with the indented trace along the south rampart, and (3) an extensive rebuild of plain ashlar blocks including the towers and reconstruction to the East and West Gates, dateable, on the basis of Procopius, to the reign of Justinian. The general significance of the fortifications at Tocra is considered in the second part: these include the Hellenistic indented trace along the south side, later reinforced by towers in the sixth century AD. Also of wider importance was the use of an outer wall or proteichisma, and the pentagonal, pointed towers at the two main gates. Both these elements were unusual in Byzantine North Africa and they are discussed as part of the more general repertory of Byzantine fortifications. The unusual tower adjacent to the West Church is considered in the context of literary accounts. The article concludes by considering how the architecture and magnitude of the fortifications can allow a reassessment of the wider role of the city in the sixth and seventh century defences of Cyrenaica.

The price inscription on an Attic black-glossed lekanis is discussed. The lekanis was found during the excavations of one of the houses in the Greek colony of Euesperides. Its significance is considered alongside the small number of price inscriptions known from Cyrenaica. Price inscriptions draw attention to the low value of Attic pottery in antiquity, and the Euesperides graffito is considered against some of the literary and epigraphic evidence used in recent discussions.

In 1840 the British Foreign Office decided to open a Vice-Consulate at the oasis of Murzuk, then still the main entrepot of the central Saharan trade in black Slaves from the Sudan to Tripoli and Benghazi. The post was to make first-hand reports on the slave traffic and promote British ‘legitimate’ trade and wider regional interests. A similar post was opened at Ghadames in 1850. Between 1843 and 1854, Vice Consul Giambattista Gagliuffi in Murzuk provided the Foreign Office with a series of yearly slaving statistics which formed the basic raw material for London's case for the abolition of this traffic. It still stands as a unique record of the central Saharan slave trade at probably its most active phase. Gagliuffi's attempts at trade promotion were not so successful, and when it also became clear that the Saharan slave trade would not, after all, be as easily eradicated as had once been supposed, the Foreign Office decided in 1860–61 to close both the Murzuk and Ghadames posts.

Over the course of the last nine years, a large number of documents have come to light that chronicle more fully American interest in Cyrenaica in the 1880s and in the first two decades of this century. The documents mainly pertain to the 1910–1911 archaeological excavation of Cyrene by Richard Norton on behalf of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Archaeological Institute of America, during the course of which Herbert Fletcher DeCou, staff epigrapher, was fatally shot. But the material also refers to hitherto unnoticed American visits to Cyrenaica for archaeological purposes in 1883 and 1887, as well as the first official American expedition in the spring of 1909. While some of these papers are already well known and also have been the source of several studies regarding the murder of DeCou, most of the material has remained largely unexplored by scholars interested in Cyrenaica. For this reason they are presented here with the expectation that future articles on specific aspects of the Cyrene papers will be forthcoming shortly.

The Fezzan Project is investigating the last 10,000 years of human settlement, landscape evolution and climatic change in the Germa region in southern Libya. The second season in February–March 1998 comprised interdisciplinary research in archaeology and geography, centred around excavation and survey work carried out at the site of Old Germa. To date, three phases of mud brick buildings have been partially explored. In addition, wider geomorphological study and archaeological survey and fieldwalking were carried out elsewhere in the Germa/Twesh oasis and around el-Hatiya. Numerous sites were discovered, including a new hillfort of Zinchecra type and several valley centre ‘villages’ of Garamantian/Roman date. Artefactual studies were carried out on pottery and lithics, animal bones and seeds. Further work on the subterranean irrigation features, the foggaras, have confirmed their pre-Islamic origins.

A third season of excavation and finds analysis at Euesperides in March/April 1998 completed the fieldwork of the project begun in 1995.

Further examination of the city defences suggests that their first phase should be dated not later than the early sixth century BC. The earliest masonry buildings within (and abutting) the city wall seem to belong to the 580s/570s BC. Other discoveries included a plain pebble pavement and a decorated ‘mixed style’ mosaic which should pre-date c. 250 BC, as well as an enchytrismos burial of the fourth century BC. The preliminary results of detailed study of the coins, pottery and lamps, and of scientific analyses of wallplaster and metal, are also presented.

The 1997 season of work on a fourth/fifth century house at Lepcis Magna consisted chiefly of study of the pottery and other finds, with limited excavation which revealed much information about the use, maintenance and repair of infrastructure for domestic water-supply. A sondage in the street showed that the house was connected to the street drainage network.