The location of the majority of major sites in Cyrenaica is well established. This has obscured the fact that our knowledge of the detailed topography of the area is in reality highly fragmentary, and can only be increased by detailed work in the field. The purpose of this article is to review the archaeological evidence from the area between Benghazi and Derna as it has been collected by the authors in recent years, and to give an account of its more important implications. On this basis one may examine the complex interrelation of local climate and geography that has controlled the development of settlement between the northern edge of the Cyrenaican plateau and the sea.The administrative unit known to the Romans as Cyrenaica lies on the coast of North Africa between longitude 19° east and 24° east. Its southern limits were never defined, but any route to the south was effectively blocked by the Calanshu sand sea and the wastelands of the Jebel Zelten.

This summary presents the main results of three seasons of survey and limited excavation work carried out by the Society at Ptolemais in Eastern Libya. The survey concentrated on two major town houses which had been partially excavated by Richard Goodchild (House G and House T), whilst excavation was carried out on the adjacent site known as the North-east Quadrant. All of the sites revealed complex structural histories and it is evident that in this quarter of Ptolemais, at least, life within the town continued well into the Islamic period.

The 1988 season of the Society's work at Tolmeta concentrated on drawing the key pottery from the 1978/79 excavations in the North-east Quadrant. These drawings are currently being processed to refine the chronology of the structural phases on this part of the site, and it is hoped that the results will be published in the 1991 volume of Libyan Studies. The opportunity was also taken in 1988 of further examining in some detail stratigraphic sections in House G. A carbon sample taken from one of the rooms has now been C14 dated to the period AD 680-780. Thus settled life in the city would seem to have continued well into the Islamic period.

The background to the Society's involvement with the part of the site of Ptolemais known as the North-East Quadrant has been outlined in a previous report in this Journal. (Annual Report of the Society for Libyan Studies 1977–78)Following a short two week season in 1978, under the overall direction of J. B. Ward-Perkins, to assess the problems of the site, the Society sent out an expanded team over a period of six weeks in May and June 1979 to commence, inter alia, a programme of excavation in the North-East Quadrant. It did not prove possible to complete the programme in 1979 and it was expected that a further, and probably final, season's work would take place in August and September 1980. In the event, however, this has not proved possible, but it is hoped that the work on site can be concluded in 1981. Meanwhile this short interim report on the results of the 1979 excavations is presented to the Society.While the main excavation effort was concentrated in the North-East Quadrant a number of sondages were made in the House of the Triapsidal Hall in an attempt to establish the date of the original building as well as that of the East Avenue (and thus that of the city's Hellenistic street grid) onto which it fronts. A trench 1.5m. wide and 4.0m. long was put down through the central room of the western range between the peristyle and the street wall. This revealed two surviving floor levels of which the upper retained traces of mosaic while the lower, which proved to be the original floor level, was of smooth plaster. The footings of the house's west wall were also revealed, set into the natural sub-soil. These levels produced a quantity of fine ware sherds which, when studied, should yield a date for the construction of the original building, as well as, by implication, the laying down of the Hellenistic street grid.

No abstract