After the victory of El-Alamein, a military administration was set up in Libya to act as a caretaker government until a peace-treaty should be concluded. This administration assumed, as part of its responsibilities, the care of the country's antiquities. In Cyrenaica the staff of the Italian Soprintendenza had been withdrawn; in Tripolitania, under Dr. G. Pesce, the Soprintendenza remained in operation. At the instance of Sir Mortimer (then Brigadier) Wheeler, Major J. B. Ward-Perkins, who was serving with the Eighth Army, was appointed Acting Adviser in Archaeology to the British Military Administration. In the summer of 1943 he made a number of recommendations as to the safeguarding of the antiquities, and in August 1944 Major C. G. C. Hyslop was appointed as Antiquities Officer for the two Libyan territories, Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, under British control. The British Antiquities Officer worked in close conjunction with the Italian Soprintendenza at Tripoli, but in Cyrenaica he had to rely almost entirely on his own resources. Maintenance and reorganization were first priorities but Hyslop also found time to issue an English guidebook to Cyrenaica. Major D. E. L. Haynes who followed Hyslop as Antiquities Officer late in 1945 produced a similar volume on Tripolitania, which after two subsequent editions and revisions commissioned by the Libyan Government in 1955 and 1959, is still the standard guide-book to the classical antiquities. Haynes was succeeded by Goodchild in September 1946, followed by Morgan in 1948 and Johns in 1950. The main responsibility of the Antiquities Department continued to be the care of the important coastal sites excavated by Italian archaeologists between 1912 and 1942, but the presence of British forces with personnel trained in desert travel and also with facilities such as transport, stores, camping-equipment, made it possible to carry out archaeological field work, especially in the pre-desert areas.

It is appropriate that the Society for Libyan Studies should recall the visit of James Bruce of Kinnaird to Libya in 1766. He was the first European to visit the country who possessed both the knowledge and the equipment to undertaken an exploratory expedition with any serious claim to scientific method. But it might seem to a reader of one of Bruce's biographies that the event was of such slight and transitory interest hardly to deserve recognition. Bruce himself allowed it to be overshadowed by his subsequent experiences in Abyssinia which culminated with his visit to the source of the Blue Nile, the final goal of his great journey. A recent bibliography of Libya and a recent standard work on the country omit all reference to his name. Surely this is unjustified. Many years were to pass before other Europeans were to undertaken comparable journeys in Libya.