In the spring of 1949, the American School of Prehistoric Research joined forces with Tufts University to carry out archaeological investigations near Tipasa, a coastal town about 70 kilometers west of Algiers. The expedition was directed by Dr. Hugh Hencken, Director of the ASPR, working alongside Professor Charles E. Stearns of Tufts University, Dr. Lloyd Cabot Briggs (ASPR Trustee), and Dr. Bruce Howe of Harvard University. Their efforts were supported by Tufts, the American Philosophical Society, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the ASPR itself, with further assistance from the Algerian Antiquities Service and the Bardo Museum in Algiers.
The team focused on a series of caves set in the coastal cliffs just outside Tipasa: the Marabout Cave, the Wet Cave, and the Fig Tree Cave. Each held traces of long-term human activity, layered across centuries. At the Marabout Cave, excavations revealed a sequence of deposits capped by a Roman-period stone wall that once sealed the cave entrance. Hearths, Roman pottery fragments, glass, coins, and evidence of collapsed rockfalls testified to shifting phases of occupation. Over time, the cave was used by Romans, later by local North African groups who combined Roman and indigenous ceramic traditions, and eventually by Berber visitors who camped there while making pilgrimages to a nearby shrine.
The Wet Cave, almost choked with boulders, yielded more limited material but confirmed Roman-era use, while the Fig Tree Cave, despite a cleared entrance, proved to be archaeologically sterile. Together, the three sites presented a complex picture of human use of the Tipasa coast: not only as a quarrying and settlement area in Roman times, but also as a place where indigenous traditions persisted alongside imported Mediterranean influences.
One of the expedition’s most striking findings was the diversity of pottery recovered. Distinctive categories were identified, from Roman wares and Christian-period lamps to medieval Islamic glazed ceramics, as well as handmade Berber wares. Some deposits even contained traces of prehistoric tools, like a flint blade characteristic of the Mesolithic Iberomaurusian tradition (roughly 20,000–10,000 years ago), showing how the caves preserved evidence of human presence across vastly different eras.
Although the caves near Tipasa might seem marginal compared to the great villas and cemeteries of the Roman town itself, the 1949 expedition demonstrated that they played an important role in the daily and spiritual life of the region’s inhabitants. The ASPR and Tufts team’s careful work revealed a microcosm of North African history — Roman quarrymen, Berber shepherds, medieval pilgrims, and much earlier prehistoric toolmakers — all leaving their mark on these sheltered cliffside caves.