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Introduction
Tripolitania is rich with the remains of burial monuments of various forms from the pre-Roman, Roman and Islamic periods. Much extant research on burial structures, however, has focused on Roman-period mausolea and considered them in isolation from other related burial structures, both spatially and temporally, without addressing that they are part of larger cemeteries that either pre-existed or were built-up around them. This results in failing to consider the complex formation and organisation of these cemeteries, especially in exploring the relationships between monumental tombs and other burials.
The ‘Funerary Monuments and Funerary Landscapes of Tripolitania’ project has begun to fill this gap in research. The pilot project predominantly focused on Roman-period cemeteries that contain large funerary monuments, particularly mausolea. This article presents a summary overview of some of that work. The primary data sources are legacy survey documents from the last 70 years collected from the archives of the Society for Libyan Studies and the UNESCO Libyan Valleys Survey (ULVS hereafter). Additional information was gathered in the Ward-Perkins Archive at the British School at Rome and the Centre Camille Julian Archive in Aix-en-Provence, as well as related publications (for the SLS Archive in more general, see Leitch and Nikolaus 2015).2 Publicly available satellite imagery from Google Earth and Bing Maps was used to locate, identify and (where possible) verify the cemetery sites and to create distribution maps of cemeteries and other related sites and features.3
This article will provide a broad overview of the relationship between cemeteries and mausolea by focusing on a few selected examples from the pre-desert areas of Tripolitania. Many of the cemeteries are still relatively well preserved and parts of the region have been intensely studied by a variety of scholars, providing a rich dataset to study.
Previous studies
Surveys and excavations in Tripolitania have rarely focused on cemeteries but when they were the subject attention was oriented to specific elements. For example, Richard Goodchild studied the inscriptions from a large cemetery in the Wadi Dreder (Goodchild 1954; 1976), stating that ‘the tombs of Bir ed-Dreder show very little variation of type’ (Goodchild 1976, 62). This was later disproved by the ULVS, which demonstrated that this cemetery was far more complex with at least six different grave types...