By Jan Peeters
After the 2023 geomorphic field season by our team members Jan Peeters and Tim Winkels, the adventure didn’t stop when the drills were packed away. In many ways, the hardest work was still ahead. Out in the field, under the Sudanese sun, the excitement of pulling up layers of ancient Nile sediment is immediate—you literally hold history in your hands. Back at our desks, the challenge is to turn field notes, sample descriptions, and photos into a clear story of how the Nile shaped this ancient landscape.
Percussion-corer team drilling on the transect line with Jebel Barkal in the background (photo: Pawel Wolf).
The first step for our team member on desk-duty (your author) was to transform the borehole logs into digital form. Every 10 cm of sediment had been carefully described in the field: texture, color, grain size and sorting. Lined up side by side, these logs form transects: cross-sections through the valley that reveal how the river flowed, build-up floodplains or cut into its own deposits. Suddenly, the cores stop being isolated columns of sand and clay and start telling a story of landscapes in motion.
Your author at work on digitizing the transects (photo: Jan Peeters).
At Jebel Barkal we now have two transects: one across the entire Nile Valley, another across the East Mound (see our previous blog post). Together they provide a rare, full view on the valley’s deposits—actually it is the first of its kind in Sudan! Constructing these transects was meticulous work, requiring constant comparison between field notes, photographs, and sample descriptions. Even subtle differences—slightly coarser sand or a thinner clay lens—can change our interpretation of past river behavior. All data were carefully verified and integrated using a Geographical Information System (GIS), allowing us to link boreholes and geomorphic units across the site.
Of course, knowing what the deposits look like is only half the story. To find out when they were laid down, we turned to dating. We collected samples for Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL), which measures the last time sand grains were exposed to sunlight. Analyzed by Elizabeth Chamberlain at the Netherlands’ Centre for Luminescence dating, these ages give us a timeline for the Nile’s activity. Some boreholes also contained tiny, abraded pottery sherds, swept in by Nile floods or discarded long ago. Our ceramic specialist, Saskia Büchner-Matthews, studied these fragments to provide additional chronological clues.
Example of the degraded and rolled ceramic material our specialist has to work with (photo: Saskia Büchner-Matthews).
Bringing all this together: transects, OSL ages, ceramic dates, we can start piecing together how the Nile’s evolving channel and floodplains shaped life at Jebel Barkal. It’s slow, detailed work, but it reveals how the river and people interacted over thousands of years at one of Nubia’s most remarkable sites. A fuller scientific report on these findings is now being prepared for submission to an international journal. So stay tuned!
This work has been made possible through the generous support of the Rust Family Foundation and private individuals, including Kitty Picken and Roger and Ann Cogswell.
