GHF in the News - 2005 News Archives

Return to Cyrene. GHF Funding Assists GIS Mapping of Cyrene

October 2005

By Mark Rose
Archaeology Magazine
Publication Date: Sept/Oct 2005

Drought gripped the Aegean island of Thera in the middle of the seventh century B.C. Desperate, the islanders sent an embassy to Delphi, to ask the oracle of Apollo for advice. There, the priestess told them to found a colony in Libya. Whether the story is legend or fact—it is recorded variously by poets, historians, and on ancient inscriptions—a Greek colony was established at Cyrene around 630 B.C. on an exceptionally fertile, well-watered plateau eight miles from the coast. Melding with the local population, the colonists flourished and, for a thousand years, their city was a leading center of commerce and culture in the eastern Mediterranean.

Explorations at Cyrene, conducted by American, Italian, British, and Libyan archaeologists, have taken place for nearly a century. As early as 1884, the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) began considering an expedition to Cyrene. In 1910, Richard Norton, son of AIA founder Charles Eliot Norton, led a team to the site, but the excavation was cut short after his assistant, Herbert Fletcher De Cou, was murdered (his killers were never identified). It was a half century before Americans returned. In 1969, a mission directed by Donald White and sponsored first by the University of Michigan and then by the University of Pennsylvania, began excavations at what proved to be one of the largest sanctuaries of the goddesses Demeter and Persephone ever found. Fieldwork there was suspended in 1981 because of the deepening hostilities between the United States and Libya. (Publication of the results continued, however, with 11 monographs on the site and finds being published to date.)

CAP’s (the Cyrenaica Archaeological Project) work is being supported by a grant from the Ambassador’s Fund for Cultural Preservation that is providing the money for GPS and photographic and computer equipment; upgrades for electrical, heating and air-conditioning systems in the department computer lab and the library; and book conservation. Another gift, from the Global Heritage Fund, a nonprofit preservation organization, will support additional GIS work.