We have just finished our second week of excavation at Jebel Barkal for 2022. It continues to be very cool (lows in the 40s F) and often windy, which sometimes makes cleaning off the ancient walls a particularly dusty job.
We are working in two different areas of the mound. One is a big mass of urban architecture that we started in 2019. One of our goals for this year was to find at least one edge to this block of architecture so that we could begin to understand what kinds of buildings we were looking at. So it was exciting to find an alleyway that seems to be the northern edge of this block of the ancient city.
In our other excavation area, we are clearing what appears to be a very long and wide street that runs roughly parallel to the Nile. It appears to run for at least 40 meters, and there seems to be another section of it further to the north, so this seems to be a main route through this part of the city. It looks as if it’s 5-8 meters wide, which makes it quite monumental for this period in Sudan (we think it dates to the 1st century BCE – 1st century CE).
Finally, although I could talk about many other parts of the dig (and we plan to do that in coming posts), I will end for today with snakes. Ever since Indiana Jones, many of us have associated archaeology with snakes, sometimes with good reason. When University of Michigan graduate student Greg Tucker came here in 2018 to do a complete magnetometry survey of the mound, he worked with local guys to dig out a huge amount of the coarse grass (halfa) that covered the site. It turned out that the grass concealed a large number of snakes. When you’re digging in flip-flops, as many of the local guys do, it’s safer to whack snakes first and ask questions later.
This season, as we were cleaning out the loose dirt that had washed into an old excavation trench, another snake appeared. It did not look benign, and it did not end well for the snake.
That’s it for today!
