As the civil war in Sudan continues, we are continuing to try to support colleagues in their efforts to protect sites and provide educational opportunities to people in surrounding towns and villages. Our team is also continuing what research we can–much of this involves analysis of data that we have collected.
Today, we are announcing the completion of a quite remarkable report on Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) at Jebel Barkal, for which we had a major campaign in our winter 2023 season. The interpretation of our results is presented below–this is the work of Pawel Wolf, who also contributed to collecting the data in the field along with a team from Eastern Atlas, a German geophysics company. The full report is available here: https://www.academia.edu/122458605/J_Barkal_Geophysics_Report_2023.
This images takes some explanation, but the big picture is that the temples and palaces that Jebel Barkal is so well known for were actually surrounded by a dense city.
GPR is a method that shows us what is under the ground–for us, this means ancient architecture, but also sometimes burials, or even ancient pitting that might be drainage canals, or gardens, or just construction debris.
The image above is an interpretation of what we see in the GPR data. Building plans in black are the structures that have long been known from excavation. The red plans are buildings that are not visible on the surface, but were found by GPR. The green circles are pits that might represent where trees were planted between the temples, but we would need to excavate that area to see if that interpretation is correct.
There is much more in this image and if you are interested, you migt consult the report at the link above or send Geoff Emberling (geoffe@umich.edu) an email.
The backstory to this work is also interesting. Some of you may know that we were featured in an episode of the National Geographic series “Lost Cities Revealed with Albert Lin”–we were in episode 2, which is called “Warrior Kings”. National Geographic funded the GPR work we are reporting here and used some of it in their reconstruction of the city at Jebel Barkal. We are grateful for their interest and support!
