Archaeologists working at Rirha, a site in Morocco’s Gharb plain, announced that a structure long classified as a cistern is a public bathhouse, the latest finding that emerged from two new trenches opened this season at a site that has been rewriting the archaeology of pre-Roman North Africa for two decades.
Rirha, on the right bank of the Oued Beht in Morocco’s Gharb plain, covers about 10 hectares and preserves a rare continuous sequence from the Amazigh kingdom, Mauretania to the medieval era, making it a key site for studying early North African urbanism, where earlier layers are typically buried beneath later occupation.
The site has been excavated under a Franco-Moroccan program launched in 2004, runs through Morocco’s Institut National des Sciences de l’Archéologie et du Patrimoine with partners from the University of Montpellier Paul Valéry, the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid, and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In 2011, excavations pulled a bronze strongbox from the collapse layer of a third-century fire, decorated with the Roman god of wine, Bacchante, with a complex iron locking mechanism on the reverse. Fewer than ten objects of this type survive from the entire Roman Empire, most from Pompeii.
The fire that destroyed the building had also sealed the winery next door with pressing floors, storage basins, built in the late second century, intact beneath the debris. Both are the subject of ongoing study and restoration.
Excavations have continued for two decades because the site’s layered occupation requires precise stratigraphic work to distinguish between pre Roman, Roman and medieval phases and to correct earlier misreadings of structures, such as the bathhouse now identified in the latest campaign.
The problem for scholars of pre-Roman Morocco is that sites of this age are almost always buried under Roman and medieval layers, making the earliest periods nearly inaccessible.
At Rirha, the western section has yielded roughly 250 square meters of the Mauretanian quarter, mudbrick houses, streets, kitchen areas, one of the largest exposed pre-Roman residential areas in the Maghreb.
Ancient sources identify the settlement as Gilda, a name supported by stamped tiles bearing the abbreviation “GLD” found near the site, suggesting that Rirha corresponds, at least in part, to that town. The name Gilda is attested in multiple classical sources, including the Antonine Itinerary, Pomponius Mela and Claudius Ptolemy, where it appears as an inland settlement of Mauretania Tingitana.
These references place Gilda within a network of towns linking the interior agricultural plains to larger Roman centers such as Volubilis and coastal ports, part of the system through which goods, people and authority moved across the province after its annexation in 40 AD.
Archaeological evidence from Rirha, including imported ceramics, coins and production activity, aligns with that profile of a connected inland settlement integrated into Mediterranean trade circuits.
Some research projects go further, suggesting that Gilda may have held a more prominent role within the Mauretanian kingdom before Roman rule, possibly as a regional center or early political node.
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