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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 March 2015
Ain Wif is well known to students of Roman Tripolitania as the settlement and military road-station of Thenadassa, studied and published by Goodchild and Ward-Perkins. The site lies on the summit of the eastern bank of the Wadi Wif prior to its confluence with the larger Wadi Hammam, and is some fifteen kilometres west of Sidi as Sid (Tazzoli) village. The ain (spring) is marked by a small oasis of palms and, as Goodchild and Ward-Perkins pointed out, the assured water-supply was presumably the determining factor in the establishment of the Roman settlement, sometime in the first century A.D.
During a visit to the site in December 1978, as Research Assistant to Olwen Brogan for the Society of Libyan Studies, I discovered a dense concentration of struck flints immediately to the north-east of the oasis. (Plate ?. Map ref. UR 463 686 on sheet 1989. II, Qarat al Bayda, series P761 of the U.S. Army Map Service). With the help of Miss Tina Watson, 124 struck flints, mostly waste flakes, and a number of fire-crazed flints were picked up from the surface within the space of half an hour. The main concentration lies within an area of about five metres square on sand and gravel and, no doubt, represents a prehistoric knapping-floor. It is doubtful whether much, if any, stratigraphy will be found on the site.
1. Goodchild, R. G. and Ward-Perkins, J. B., ‘The Limes Tripolitanus in the light of recent discoveries’, JTS XXXIX, 1949, 81–95Google Scholar. Reprinted in Reynolds, J. (Ed.), Libyan Studies, Select Papers of the late R. G. Goodchild, London 1976Google Scholar.
2. During a previous visit to the site with Tina Watson and Peter Couldrey a small amount of first and second century pottery, including three examples of African Red Slip form 3 (Hayes typology), and a battered fragment of an inscription on stone were found. They have been deposited in the museum storeroom at Lepcis.
3. McBurney, C. B. M., The Stone Age of Northern Africa, London, 1960, 222Google Scholar.
