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.

Since the revolution of September 1969 very bold and expensive experiments have been mounted to test the productivity of Libya's soil and water resources. Ten years on it is appropriate to review these experiments in terms of the extension of the irrigated and cultivated area as well as with respect to the impact of such innovations on the renewable natural resources base and the viability of agricultural production in existing or changed economic circumstances.

Libyan economic development takes place in the special circumstances of an oil economy in which the massive oil revenues accruing to the government are deployed almost exclusively through the public sector via ministries and secretariats. In an oil economy a special and inescapable burden of responsibility falls to the government to lead and direct economic and social change (Penrose 1973, p7) and this role has at no time been avoided by the revolutionary government. On the contrary there has been a progressive rationalisation of activity and property since 1969 so that by 1979 almost all commercial and industrial activity, as well as housing and services were controlled by government agencies.

The agricultural sector has been affected by this trend towards public intervention directly through the capital invested in cultivation, irrigation and livestock and indirectly through the control of the marketing of agricultural products. The final phase of this interaction is seen in the new proposal to reorganize the farming of the coastal strip of the Jefara Plain and the coastal area as far as east Misuratah, with a view to creating viable agricultural units able to support a Libyan family with no outside labour. The economic, social and ideological implications of this proposal are immense not to speak of the opportunity which such a reorganization would present for the rational management of the crucial and much impaired groundwater resource upon which irrigated farming depends in the favoured and therefore ‘over-developed’ coastal strip.

Over thirty years of Italian rule in Libya (1911–1942), while leaving a considerable infrastructure of roads, schools and other public buildings, provided only a poor legacy in terms of skilled and educated Libyan manpower. This is attested by the fact that in 1951, there were only five graduates of Italian universities and perhaps ten from the Islamic University of Al-Azhar in Cairo. Moreover, there were no Arab directors of elementary schools or persons qualified for the non-Islamic professions or trained as agricultural experts. On the other hand, apologists of Italian rule emphasise that by 1942 Italy had made an important contribution towards solving some of Libya's most chronic problems. Although official statistics must be treated with caution, it is likely that by 1939 around 9676 pupils were enrolled in the halo-Arab schools, even if only 50% attended regularly. A further 147 students were said to be attending the School of Islamic Studies or al-Madrasah al-Islamiyya al-ùlyá at Tripoli which trained Islamic lawyers, school teachers and minor officials. 22 Moslem girls were also receiving training as nurses at the school of Princess Maria Pia originally set up in January 1936. The object of this paper, however, is not to narrate the achievements and defects of Italian rule in Libya, but to ask, what possible problems in the political, as opposed to the economic or other related fields, might have contributed to such a state of imbalance. Was it, for instance, some kind of “apartheid” policy on the part of the colonial regime that prevented Libyans from attending the excellent system of Italian secondary schools and so going on, like their Italian contemporaries, to become skilled artisans, technicians, engineers, doctors or administrators? Or was it because the mass of the Libyan population were so basically opposed to the Italian regime that they regarded attendance at the schools, whether elementary or secondary, as an act of collaboration with the hated oppressor? These are just two of the areas that would have to be explored by the historian before any explanation could be put forward of what can be termed the “central dilemma” of educational development in Libya under Italian rule.

The methodology of Mediterranean pottery study (for all periods, but especially for the Roman period) has developed considerably over the past fifteen years, and the range of questions asked of it has been greatly extended. Alongside the traditional approach to pottery studies, which concentrates on typology and chronology, there has been an increasing emphasis on the characterization and determination of the origin of pottery using scientific methods, and also a growing awareness of the importance of pottery quantification (i.e. expressing the relative frequency of different pottery types or styles).

It is as a result of these latter two developments that coarse, functional wares can now be used convincingly to complement and greatly extend the economic information provided by fine, decorative wares. Cyrenaica has been in the fore-front of this research (see summary in Humphrey 1979), and it is the purpose of this article to provide a preliminary examination of one aspect, namely the contribution of petrological analysis to our understanding of Cyrenaican local pottery fabrics, and of coarse ware imports.

Before a satisfactory typology of pottery from any area can be established, and before that pottery can be used most effectively as evidence for the resolution of economic problems, it is essential that the local fabrics should be recognised. Although visual classification of pottery fabric types is often possible on the basis of subjective factors such as general appearance, texture, hardness, nature of inclusions, etc. (as described in Young in press), there are often problems when attempting to establish their origin. This is normally best done by scientific analysis, using either geological or chemical techniques. It is rapidly becoming the routine practice to analyse fabrics, in the first instance, by geological methods (to identify the major inclusions within the clay), and then, if necessary, by chemical methods (which analyse the elemental composition of the clay).