It is likely that some list members have not yet heard of the sad 
death of John Lloyd. I am forwarding the text of Graeme Barker's 
obituary, which appeared in the London _Independent_ on 
Wednesday 9 June. Graeme is preparing a longer text for the 
Papers of the BSR.

Mark
------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
Date sent:      	Fri, 11 Jun 1999 12:12:37 +0200
To:             	[log in to unmask]
From:           	[log in to unmask] (Graeme Barker)
Subject:        	John Lloyd
DR JOHN LLOYD

Classical archaeology has traditionally been dominated by the 
study of the lives of the rich and powerful - great cities, great 
monuments, great art. Yet one of the great strengths of 
archaeology is that it is also extremely good at revealing the lives 
of ordinary people:  only the elite built villas and wrote documents, 
but everybody from emperor to slave created archaeology, in the 
sense of leaving bits and pieces of rubbish for the modern 
archaeologist to recover.  In recent decades British classical
archaeologists have played a leading role in showing how skilful 
fieldwork and painstaking analysis of the humdrum material culture 
of ordinary peoples' lives can  write an entirely new archaeological 
history of what the ancient world was like far from the shadow of 
the Colosseum. John Lloyd was preeminent in this group.

        Whilst he was studying English as an undergraduate at 
Manchester, he started working as a student volunteer on the 
excavations of Professor Barri Jones, Professor of Archaeology 
there,  becoming one of the band of young  archaeologists now in 
very senior positions who learned field skills of the highest quality 
in the Manchester school.  After graduation he embarked on a 
publishing career with Cambridge University Press,  but he 
continued excavating in his spare time, including spending a few 
months at new rescue excavations that had started at Benghazi in 
Libya in 1971. Clearance for development of a Turkish Ottoman 
cemetery there in the suburb of Sidi Khrebish was destroying 
extensive remains of the Greek and Roman city  of Berenice. At 
the invitation of the Libyan Department of Antiquities, the Society 
for Libyan Studies, an academic society in Britain founded in 1969 
at the time of the Libyan Revolution to maintain existing strong 
links with Libyan scholars (many senior Libyan archaeologists have 
trained in Britain), had mounted an emergency operation to try to 
salvage the archaeology.  In November 1972, at the age of 24,  
John Lloyd was asked by the Society to take over the excavations
as its Field Director.   He spent the greater part of the next three 
years in Benghazi, completing a major excavation at Sidi Khrebish, 
coordinating a small army of workmen and specialists almost all 
his own age or older. The excavation generated enormous 
quantities of data,  the study of which he also coordinated with 
immense commitment and patience,  editing a series of five major 
volumes (Excavations at Sidi Khrebish) published by the Society 
for Libyan Studies over the next twenty years on every aspect
of life in the ancient city over almost a thousand years, from the 
third century BC to the coming of Islam, an 'archaeological history' 
of a Mediterranean city that has probably only been rivalled by the 
work of the several international teams of excavators at Carthage in 
Tunisia.
        His research interests expanded into Italy when in 1976 he 
joined a team of archaeologists, historians and geographers 
studying the long-term landscape history of the Biferno valley, on 
the Adriatic side of the peninsula east of Rome. The main 
archaeological component was a field-walking programme: teams 
of archaeologists searched every ploughed field down the length of 
the valley, mapping the spreads of potsherds and other 
archaeological debris in the ploughsoil that were the vestiges of 
ancient settlements. In the classical period the Biferno valley was 
within the homeland of the Samnites, the warrior nation that was 
the main obstacle to Rome's expansion in the Italian peninsula. 
John Lloyd studied the abundant material recovered by the project 
for the Samnite period (from about 500 BC to the Roman conquest 
of the valley in 80 BC) and Roman period (80 BC- AD 600).  After 
the survey finished in 1978, he spent the next few seasons 
excavating one of the classical sites found in the valley, at Matrice, 
 the first excavation in the region of an ordinary classical 
farmstead.  In the final report on the Biferno valley work he 
integrated his studies of the survey data with the results of his 
Matrice excavations and  excavations  by Italian colleagues. His 
chapters on Samnite and Roman settlement in the book on the 
survey project  (A Mediterranean Valley: Landscape Archaeology 
and Annales History in the Biferno Valley), supported by his 
meticulously-produced catalogue of supporting data, are probably 
the most outstanding regional study of classical settlement 
anywhere in Italy, demonstrating that pre-Roman Samnite society 
was infinitely more sophisticated - urban in fact - than the hillbilly 
society described to us by  Roman writers, and that it continued in 
its essential fabric after Romanization. His book on his Matrice 
excavations, about to go to press at the time of his death, will be 
one of a very few excavation reports of classical rural sites in Italy
excavated to the highest modern standards.
        He joined the Department of Ancient History at Sheffield in 
1977 as a lecturer in classical archaeology, and whilst there he 
embarked on further fieldwork,  directing excavations with Sheffield 
colleagues of the vicus or native settlement outside the Roman fort 
of Brough in the Peak District,  and also a field-walking survey of 
Greek rural settlement at Megalopolis in the Peloponnese. When 
he co-edited Roman Landscapes: Archaeological Survey in the 
Mediterranean Region (1991), a book arising from an international 
conference at the British School at Rome looking at the 
achievements of field-walking archaeology, his fieldwork in Italy and
Greece underpinned his concluding study, where he wrote of the 
entirely unsuspected 'busy countryside' of villages, villas, farms and 
cottages that was being revealed by  survey archaeologists like 
him in every Mediterranean country.
        In the ten years since he moved to Oxford's Institute of 
Archaeology, he had resumed work in Libya, directing rescue 
excavations for the Society of Libyan Studies with a colleague from 
Benghazi's Gar Yunis University at Euhesperides, the first Greek 
colony at Benghazi. Their excavations demonstrated that the city 
was founded earlier than supposed, in the sixth century BC,  
surviving till it was replaced by Berenice in the third century BC, as 
well as illuminating how the new colony was supported by its 
agricultural hinterland, its trading contacts with the eastern 
Mediterranean, and the processes of social interaction between 
incoming Greeks and indigenous Libyans. He also continued his
field researches on the Samnites, directing a major survey and 
excavation project in the Sangro valley with colleagues from Italy, 
Oxford,  and Leicester, culminating in the excavation of a Samnite 
hillfort settlement, Monte Pallano.  It was during his final scheduled 
season of fieldwork in the Sangro valley, in September 1998, that 
he was first taken ill with what transpired to be a brain tumour.
        John Lloyd was an exceptionally modest man who constantly
downplayed his achievements, but his archaeology was 
characterized by meticulous and careful scholarship made to last, 
whether in his own research or as a gifted and painstaking editor 
for the publications of the Society for Libyan Studies and the 
British School at Rome. That he achieved such remarkable and 
enduring results in his Libyan, Greek  and Italian fieldwork was in 
part because of the modesty,  sensitivity  and integrity he brought 
to his professional relations. He had a tremendously strong sense 
of the importance of doing the right thing by his collaborators, his 
colleagues in the UK and abroad, his authors, his field teams, the 
students he taught at Sheffield and Oxford, and the family of which 
he was so proud. Burly and saturnine, he alternated between 
studied gloom and sparkling fun, between caution about his own 
archaeological achievements and generosity in his judgement of 
and support for other scholars.  He set standards of 
professionalism few archaeologists emulate; his fieldwork has given 
us new understanding of ordinary life in towns and villages and 
farms throughout the ancient world;  and in his caring for the 
profession of archaeology, and how it should be done to the 
highest standards, he had a profound influence on the careers of 
scores of archaeologists in Britain and abroad fortunate enough to 
be touched by his wisdom and wit.

John Alfred Lloyd, archaeologist, born Broughty Ferry near Dundee, 
29 April 1948; married 1976 Vicky Doughty (one son and one 
daughter); Lecturer, University of Sheffield 1977-1988; Lecturer, 
University of Oxford and Fellow of Wolfson College, 1988-99; died 
Oxford 30 May 1999.

Graeme Barker


-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
Dr Mark PEARCE,
Dept of Archaeology, University of NOTTINGHAM, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK.
tel. +44.(0)115.951.4839; fax. +44.(0)115.951.4812; email [log in to unmask];
URL http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/archaeology/staff/mpearce.htm


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