Over the past week, the Jebel Barkal team has begun to gather in Sudan as we begin our 2023 season—it’s very exciting to be heading back into the field.
We have a big team that will allow us to continue clearing the plan of the Meroitic city (250 BCE – 50 CE) under the guidance of Tim Skuldbøl and perhaps get down to Napatan levels below. We also have a great group of pottery analysts led by Saskia Büchner-Matthews, who are working to identify the local industry and also to identify ceramics imported from Egypt and the Mediterranean (and perhaps elsewhere). Anna den Hollander will be doing flotation to investigate ancient crop plants and weeds that tell us about the local environment, and Bailey Franzoi will be identifying animal bones—did they really eat so little fish?
A bit later in the season, we will begin our big conservation project working on the temple area. Suzanne Davis, conservator at the Kelsey Museum at University of Michigan, will be directing this part of the project. We will evaluate standing walls and fallen blocks of two smaller temples, known as B 600 and B 700. We will begin to remove backdirt from the excavations of George Reisner that make it difficult for visitors to understand the temple complex—this will require screening, since important objects have been found in Reisner’s remains. We will construct drainage to redirect rainwater (yes, it rains in Sudan!) around architectural elements. As a part of this project, we will investigate results from a Ground Penetrating Radar survey of the area completed last year, which suggested that the temples did not exist in isolation as they appear today, but were rather set in a dense urban settlement. We are fortunate that our colleague Pawel Wolf will conduct a test excavation of this area—Pawel is a great archaeologist, and we look forward to his findings.
We will also continue our investigation of the ancient environment around Jebel Barkal with geomorphological investigation of Jan Peeters and Tim Winkels. Last season, they discovered that there had been a Nile channel running next to the site (we are still waiting on dates for the infilling of this channel). This season, they will try to map the channel in more detail.
We will post on the blog during the season—stay tuned!
