When PNAS published our team’s paper on Holocene Nile dynamics at Jebel Barkal a few weeks ago, we hoped the research would travel beyond the journal. We invested hours drafting and sending pitches we hoped would catch the public imagination!
We’ve enjoyed a lot of success: in our last blog post we told you how the story had been picked up by outlets such as The National. It has since reached Sudan via Al Jazeera, Africa more broadly via Africa Daily, and has been translated into Polish, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. As of 20 May, Altmetric (a ‘data and tracking system that measures the online attention and societal impact of scholarly research’) reports that the paper is in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked, ranking in the 99th percentile for papers of a similar age and in the 95th percentile among papers published in PNAS. These scores are really remarkable and we’re delighted to watch the paper’s impact grow.
We’re aware that not everyone has had the chance to read the paper itself, so we thought this was a good moment for a deeper dive, prompted by two new articles that tell the story from different angles.
Jan Peeters’ “Behind the Paper” essay, published on the Springer Nature Research Communities (1 May), is the place to start. It explains the practical craft of reading a landscape: each of the 26 sediment cores the team drilled is a vertical timeline of sand, silt and clay, and taken together they allow you to reconstruct cross-sections through the valley and trace how the river has behaved over thousands of years. Sands signal former channels; finer clays record floodplain environments. The key finding that emerges is that around 4,000 years ago the Nile shifted from actively cutting into the valley to building it up, depositing thick layers of fertile sediment that created an unusually stable floodplain near Jebel Barkal. The confined valley near the Fourth Cataract appears to have played an important role, slowing and constraining the river in ways that encouraged sediment accumulation. That stable, productive floodplain was, in effect, the geological foundation on which the Kushite capital of Napata was built.
Geoff’s piece in The Conversation, published 19 May (and which has already been picked up by outlets such as the National Tribune all the way in Australia!), is the human complement to all of this. Geoff describes the reality of drilling those cores across a Saharan floodplain: the relentless sun, the weeks of physical graft alongside a local team, boreholes pushing seven to ten metres down into the valley floor. And it makes the headline finding vivid: yes, an ancient Nile channel once ran close to Jebel Barkal, but that was roughly 10,000 years ago, millennia before the Kushites arrived. What made Napata possible was what the river left behind.
Both pieces are also careful to resist the trap of environmental determinism. The landscape didn’t dictate where people settled; it shaped the range of possibilities. The religious significance of Jebel Barkal, its connectivity along the Nile corridor, the symbolic weight of that sandstone outcrop all mattered, too.
Together these pieces tell the human and methodological story behind the science. We hope you enjoy them!
