John Alfred Lloyd, BA, PhD

John Lloyd was born in Broughty Ferry, Angus, on 29 April 1948 and read English at Manchester University. As an undergraduate his holidays were spent as a volunteer on Professor Barri Jones’s excavations, where he learned his field skills from a master. In 1971 he was lucky to be involved in rescue excavations, organised by the Libyan Department of Antiquities and the Society for Libyan Studies, at Sidi Khrebish, a suburb of Benghazi, where clearance for development of a disused Muslim cemetery was destroying remains of the Greek and Roman city of Euesperides/Berenice. In the following year, at the age of twenty-four, Lloyd was appointed field director of this major excavation, which was to occupy him for the next three years, overseeing the work of specialists often his senior in age and experience. The finds were prolific; Lloyd co-ordinated their study with patience and commitment and edited a series of five volumes, Excavations at Sidi Khrebish, published by the Society for Libyan Studies over the next twenty years, covering every aspect of life in the ancient city from the third century BC to the coming of Islam. In 1976, excavation in Libya being finished for the time being, Lloyd joined a field-walking programme in Italy studying the landscape history of the Biferno valley, east of Rome. The team comprised archaeologists, historians and geographers who searched the terrain, mapping the spread of all vestiges of ancient settlements. Lloyd concentrated on material from the Samnite and Roman periods and after work on the survey closed in 1978 he spent several seasons excavating one of the classical sites found in the valley, at Matrice, the first excavation in the region of a classical farmstead. His publication of this work, about to go to press at the time of his death, is awaited as one of the few Italian rural sites to be excavated to the highest contemporary standards. Lloyd was appointed a lecturer in classical archaeology in the Department of Ancient History at Sheffield in 1977, from where he continued his fieldwork in Italy and preparation of the results for publication and organised a field-walking survey of Greek rural settlement at Megalopolis in the Peloponnese. In 1988 he moved to the Institute of Archaeology at Oxford and resumed rescue work at Euesperides for the Society for Libyan Studies. With a Libyan colleague, he established that the city was founded in the sixth century BC, earlier than had been supposed, and had survived until replaced by the Greek colony of Berenice in the third century BC. He also continued his field researches on the Samnites, directing a major survey project in the Sangro valley with colleagues from Italy, Oxford and Leicester and the excavation of a Samnite hillfort settlement at Monte Pallano. While at Oxford he co-edited Roman Landscapes: archaeological survey in the Mediterranean region (1991), describing settlement in villages, farms and cottages revealed by his own work and that of fellow survey-archaeologists; and published A Mediterranean Valley: landscape archaeology and annales history in the Biferno Valley (1995), an outstanding regional study of classical settlement in Italy. Lloyd’s work resulted in a new understanding of ordinary life in towns and villages throughout the ancient world and his early death is a great loss to classical scholarship. Always generous towards collaborators, colleagues and students, he was an essentially modest man who insisted on the highest standards of professional competence both from himself and others. Digging in Italy in the autumn of 1998 he was taken ill with what was later diagnosed as a brain tumour and died in Oxford on 30 May 1999, a month after his fiftieth birthday.