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Kelsey had been caught between fueding French officials—supportive metroplitan authorities arrayed against an antagonistic Service de Antiquités, which limited his access to artifacts from the American excavations—while the Missionaries of Africa (Péres Blancs) continued their independent archaeological prospection. The Péres Blancs had control over the Byrsa Hill in the center of Carthage, where the Cathedral of Saint Louis served as their scholasticate and housed the archaeological Musée Lavigerie. They had an abiding interest in the monuments of Christian Carthage, from the time of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas and of St. Augustine, but were less than ideal stewards of Punic and Roman monuments, to the extent of selling church lands and ancient artifacts to support their missionary work. Kelsey had realized the necessity for state intervention to prevent such profiteering, but little hindered rampant land speculation and trafficking in artifacts.

Soon after the death of Rev. Delattre in 1932, a plot adjacent to the 1920s excavations (propriété Carton) and land under the closed rue de Numidie became available for expanding excavations at the precinct. Unscientific excavations resumed under his successor, Rev. G.-G. Lapeyre MAfr (1934-36). The order's archives do not have his excavation records, although some correspondence survives (GAMAfr). The Académie (AIBL) supported his campaigns and the removal of inscribed stelae, destined to be published in the CIS I.3922-5275. In this period D. B. Harden regained access to Kelsey artifacts, allowing him to prepare his ceramic typology.
  sample: letter to Lapeyre from H. Marchal (30 June 1934), mentioning Carthage
  ©2023 General Archives of the Missionaries of Africa (Lapeyre 0023)
  Lapeyre correspondence • GAMAfr

Immediately after the interruption of the Second World War, new excavations were opened (1944-47), again in an adjacent undeveloped lot (propriété Lacour/Hervé). The director of the French archaeological mission in Tunisia, Pierre Cintas (left), working with the Service des Antiquités director, Gilbert Charles Picard, then opened up an area nearly equal to those of previous campaigns combined. Unfortunately, records from those campaigns left Tunisia with Cintas and Picard at the end of the French protectorate, and a promised final report never appeared. Some records and correspondence may be held at the École française de Rome (ÉFR, Gutron 2008, 2010) and the Centre Camille Jullian at Aix-Marseille (CNRS-CCJ). Inscribed stelae from this excavation did make their way into the CIS, although some were published previously, with photos but without transcription, in a Bardo Museum catalog (then called the Musée Alaoui, Picard 1954: Cb—479-797).
  Cintas records and correspondence • ÉFR • CCJ

University of Chicago excavation staff, 1979 (view of the precinct looking West)
back to front: Samuel R. Wolff (CT6); M. Heidi, Joseph A. Greene (CT5); Lawrence E. Stager, Douglas L. Esse (CT1)
©2023 ASOR Punic Project (J. Whitred)

Following the disruptions of war and the struggle for independence, the area around Carthage again began to face land speculation pressure. When the UNESCO Campagne internationale de sauvegarde de Carthage was inititated in response, an American team was given responsibility for excavating the precinct instead of the French, perhaps because of ill-feelings harbored at the end of the protectorate due to inaccessible records and postponed publication (Gutron 2008, 2010). The American team held a concession for the exact same terrain that de Prorok had once purchased, as well as a concession to excavate along the adjacent commercial harbor. Both of these ASOR Punic Project excavations, led by L. E. Stager, relied upon support from the Smithsonian Foreign Currency Program, and these campaigns ran until the funds were exhausted (1975-1979). The first year of the campaign focused on the commercial harbor, although a survey was made of the Roman vault in the votive precinct (Stager 1976)

Excavations began where Kelsey's team had left off but, instead of rapid extraction of artifacts by gangs of workmen, only a few 5x5m grids were opened yearly, each worked by one graduate student and one workman at a time. The center grid was excavated every year (CT1 • D. Esse, D. Saltz; CT1annex • S. Wolff); two grids the East were worked in the first years (CT2 • V. Ward; CT3 • L. Herr, S. Segert, G. Pratico); two to the West in the last years (CT5 • J. Greene; CT6 • S. Wolff); and for one year a grid to the South (CT4 • G. Ahlström, K. McVey). Although they had an epigrapher on staff (P. Mosca), the ASOR team put greater emphasis on site stratigraphy and on urns with their contents.
  sample: ASOR Punic Project CT site plan
  Stager records and correspondence • HMANE

Since 2014, after sondages near the Villa Prier, land under rue Jugurtha has been excavated by the Tunisian Institute national du Patrimoine (INP). Both the HMANE-ASOR Punic Project and the INP excavations participate in the North African Heritage Archive Network (NAHAN).
  sample: site plan (history of excavations)

  American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR)

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The Punic Project is one of twenty-nine ASOR affiliated archaeological publication projects, and correlates with their cultural heritage initiatives in the Maghreb (CHI). We have also benefitted from support for travel to collections (KMA 2022) and for research residence in Tunis (Dar ben Gacem 2023).

HARVARD UNIVERSITY
  Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East (HMANE)

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  P. Der Manuelian, A. Aja
The HMANE hosts the archives of L. E. Stager as well as ASOR Punic Project excavation records and artifacts. Those artifacts on loan for study are now designated for repatriation to Tunisia. Through the HMANE, all records of the ASOR Punic Project are hosted on the Harvard Libraries Digital Repository Service (DRS), which provides a persistent DOI (digital object identifier) for the archived images and documents.
Note that we have received financial support from the Shelby White and Leon Levy Program for Archaeological Publications (White-Levy Grant, 2014), which is housed within HMANE.

NORTH AFRICAN HERITAGE ARCHIVE NETWORK (NAHAN)

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  E. Fentress
This project priovides a platform for documents from archaeological archives held in a series of European and North African institutions. This open-access resource harvests data from documents already online.

INSTITUT NATIONAL DU PATRIMOINE (INP)

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  I. ben Jerbania & A. Ferjaoui
Our Tunisian colleagues have supported our efforts toward publication and exhibition, have supported the return of artifacts taken abroad on loan for study, and support in principle our proposed non-destructive analyses of artifacts. We hope to apply the methods from our proof-of-concept exercise to artifacts in Tunisia, with high-definition 3D scanning and with replicas limited to those given prior authorization.

CORPUS INSCRIPTIONUM PHOENICARUM (CIP)
  Istituto di Studi sul Mediterraneo Antico (ISCMA)
  Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales (CCHS)

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  P. Xella (ISCMA-CNR/UTübingen) & J.-Á. Zamora (CCHS-CSIC)
Increasing accessibility to Punic inscriptions remains a primary goal of our initiative, and we will build upon the progress of the CIP in making images, transcriptions and commentary available in a searchable digital format.

  BKGarnand 15 VI 23