Here is a post from Anna den Hollander, PhD student at University College London, on archaeobotanical and environmental analysis at Jebel Barkal:
The excavation at Jebel Barkal focusses on non-elite contexts, and an important question we want to answer about daily life in these residences is the relation between the people who lived there and their environment. What did they eat? What did they cultivate? Did these practices change over time? Archaeobotanical analysis can provide some important clues that can help us understand these parts of the puzzle. The environmental processing group is therefore a key component of the large, multidisciplinary team at Jebel Barkal.
The 2023 season was the first season where we worked with a large environmental processing team, led and coordinated by Anna den Hollander and Raouf Mohamed. We got help from students from the University of Dongola at Karima: Egbal Sad Zaid, Reem Babkri Ahmed, Reham Abdallah Abd’Elrhman, and Razan Raif Aldin Mohammed. The students did not have any prior experience with flotation, heavy residue, or archaeobotanical analysis, and so the past three weeks also functioned as a practical short course in both skills. For some days they were joined by Meheira Hashim Mohamed. Our colleague Rehab Ismail from NCAM was with us during the first days to translate the archaeobotanical lectures into Arabic.
Our job consisted of two main components: flotation and heavy residue analysis. Most botanical remains are preserved though charring in or near a fire. Most contexts sampled were the large vessels found half-buried in the floor surfaces of the Meroitic houses. Some of those vessels are expected to have been used for storage, food preparation, and in some cases potentially brewing of beer. All these jars were sampled in full, as well as the floor surfaces of each of the rooms. The main aim of flotation is to separate out the carbonised (burnt) materials that are part of these large samples, making use of the fact that carbonised seeds have a lower density than the surrounding sand.
To do the flotation we poured five litres of sample in a large bucket of about 20 litres, breaking up the soil by hand and stirring it well so that the carbonised materials can float to the surface. The water and “flot” (floating material) is then poured through a fine (250 μm) mesh, after which the process is repeated for up to five times or until no botanical remains float to the surface. The flotation materials are left to dry in the sun and will be brought to London for further analysis by Anna den Hollander in the archaeobotany laboratory at University College London, where the large reference collection will help in identifying the carbonised plant remains.
The second component of our work was the heavy residue analysis. When the carbonised materials are separated by pour-over bucket flotation, the heavy sand that stays behind in the bucket is dried in the sun and poured through a 1 mm mesh. This residue is then sorted to retrieve any kind of material that may have been otherwise overlooked: (animal) bones, ceramic, lithics, small beads, fish hooks, bricks, and other small remains. In short, these samples are among the best studied square meters of soil from the site! The students were partially responsible for this process and they did an amazing job.
The season was very successful: as a team we processed more than 1500 litres of soil, from 91 samples, both from the 2022 and the 2023 seasons. Without the help of Raouf and the students this would not have been possible! In addition to the carbonised seed remains we took with us 32 ceramic sherds from both the large cooking vessels and ritual bread moulds found on the site. Analysis of these ceramics will hopefully tell us more about the use of these pots and the kind of food, drinks, or crops that were prepared, brewed, or stored in them. I look forward to working on these samples back in London and hope to share the results with you soon!
