Despite the ongoing war in Sudan, the Jebel Barkal Archaeological Project was able to have an excavation season in April that was carried out entirely by our Sudanese team members in regular consultation with international staff. We situated two small trenches that we hoped would document a connection between the palace and temple area of the site and the East Mound, where we have been documenting a less elite, more commercial area.
As often happens, our results were surprising—in one trench, we dug down over 10 feet beneath the sandy surface of the site and found that it was all part of an ancient wadi. So the ancient site would have been divided by seasonal watercourses in ways that we will try to document in more detail in the future. Our second trench recovered part of a Meroitic-period building with lots of pottery, as we would expect. We are working on the finds from this area to try to understand how it differs from others on the East Mound—this will take some time!
To learn more about the recent season, visit our project blog.
Fears about the looting of the Sudan National Museum were first raised in the early months of the civil war in Sudan. Now, two years later, the devastating news has been confirmed.
The Sudanese army recently recaptured the capital city of Khartoum, where the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) had been using the national museum as a military base. New videos show the aftermath of widespread looting, including broken and missing artifacts—both those on display and those in storage—and a heavily damaged building.
The Sudan National Museum was home to approximately 100,000 artifacts spanning millennia of Sudanese, African, and world history. Media outlets, including the Sudan Tribune, the Guardian, and others, have detailed the extent of the destruction and the responses from Sudanese officials and citizens. You can also read more on the Jebel Barkal Archaeological Project blog.
As the civil war in Sudan continues, the nation faces additional challenges due to seasonal flooding, which makes transporting critical supplies like food, water, and medicine difficult. “Sudan Road Access” is a new initiative on Zooniverse’s Planetary Response Network that aims to support humanitarian efforts in Sudan. In collaboration with the UN’s Logistics Cluster, this project seeks to map dry riverbeds—known as wadis—that flood during the rainy season and disrupt vital aid delivery routes.
Zooniverse is looking for volunteers to examine satellite images to identify and measure places where wadis cross over roads. This data will help predict and monitor flooding, ensuring that humanitarian organizations can navigate these areas more effectively and deliver aid where it is needed most.
Learn how you can get involved with the citizen science project here.
Jebel Barkal: The jebel (mountain) in the background with the Amun Temple (B 500) in the foreground.
2019 drone photo by Kate Rose.
This Wednesday, Kelsey Museum Associate Research Scientist Geoff Emberling will give a lecture about current archaeological work at the site of Jebel Barkal (ancient Napata) in northern Sudan. The site is being investigated as a joint project of the National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums of Sudan and the University of Michigan.
The lecture, “Collaborative Archaeology of Kush in Northern Sudan: Recent Work around Jebel Barkal,” will present the results of the project’s first seasons of work on Meroitic levels of settlement at the site, contemporary with the Roman occupation of Egypt (1st century BCE–1st century CE). Dr. Emberling will also discuss how the long histories of colonialism and structural racism have distorted our understanding of the ancient cultures of Africa and diminished their contributions to world history.
Visit Stanford University’s Archaeology Center website for more information and to register to attend this free lecture, which will be live-streamed from Stanford University on Wednesday, May 4, at 3:00 PM ET.
Kelsey Associate Research Scientist Geoff Emberling has been busy! He’s featured on the October 7 episode of the podcast Tides of History, hosted by historian Patrick Wyman. In the 42-minute interview, Geoff talks about the long and fascinating history of Kush, the contentious nature of previous archaeological research in Sudan, how he came to work in the region, and his projects at El-Kurru and Jebel Barkal.
Geoff also served as the academic consultant for a TED-Ed video about Kush. Published on TED.com earlier this month, the beautifully illustrated video short outlines the rise and fall of this ancient African civilization.
By Suzanne Davis, Curator of Conservation, and Carrie Roberts, Conservator
The inability to travel to the Kelsey’s field sites due to the COVID-19 pandemic has made us, well, crazy to travel to the Kelsey’s field sites. If you, too, are experiencing serious wanderlust, we invite you to take a quick photographic mini-break with us. Here’s a beautiful photo and something we love about each of the four sites we currently support.
Suzanne loves the incredibly good-looking site of Notion, Turkey. It’s got everything a conservator could want — the romantic ruins of an entire ancient city, lots of conservation work to be done, and a beautiful seaside location.
Notion, Turkey. View of the site from the west at sunset; the ancient city is located on top of the yellow, sunlit hill. If you look closely, you can see the Fortifications.
This spectacular photo of the ancient temple, cemetery, and city site of Jebel Barkal, Sudan, makes Suzanne miss the desert sunshine and all her fellow Jebel Barkal and El-Kurru teammates.
Jebel Barkal, Sudan. This image shows the remains of some of the site’s pyramids, with Jebel Barkal (in Arabic – the holy, or pure, mountain) in the background. Photo by Kate Rose.
Carrie is inspired by the ancient landscape of Abydos. It’s great to drink a cup of coffee with the team at sunrise and know that the Seti I temple is only a 10-minute walk from the dig house, while the early dynastic tombs below the desert cliffs can be reached in 20 minutes.
View of the front courtyard of the Abydos dig house at sunrise.
At El-Kurru, Carrie loves village life — walking from the house where we live to the temple site and saying hello and how are you to neighbors on the way, then grabbing a snack at the corner store at the end of the day. She also misses the family we live with, especially the kids.
El-Kurru, Sudan. On the left is Kurru’s hardware store, and on the right is the barbershop.
To celebrate the opening of the special exhibition Graffiti as DevotionAlong the Nile: El-Kurru, Sudan, I’ve chosen a particular group of graffiti for this month’s Ugly Object post. The graffiti of El-Kurru were created by ancient pilgrims to the site’s Kushite temple and pyramid. Images of animals, textiles, boats, and people were carved into the surfaces of the structures’ sandstone columns and blocks, along with hundreds of cupules — or holes — of varying size. This blogroll is all about embracing the seemingly underwhelming, so it felt only natural to take a closer look at these mysterious holes.
Pictorial and cupule graffiti on a column drum from the temple at El-Kurru. Image courtesy of Suzanne Davis.
The same qualities that make Kurru sandstone so difficult to preserve — it is soft and readily disintegrates into sand — made it ideal for stone collecting. Suzanne and Geoff, who curated the exhibition, believe that pilgrims wanted to take a piece of the powerful temple structure with them as they continued on their journey. I can picture someone rotating a knife into the column surface while a pile of powder grows in their hand. This debris apparently brought protection or healing to whoever possessed it, which helps explain why the temple columns are so … holy. Apparently, a lot of people wanted a piece of that Kurru magic!
Most of the students and faculty have vacated Ann Arbor for the summer break, but it’s always busy here in the Kelsey’s conservation lab! This month we’re hard at work on all kinds of things.
My main work this month is to finish a book and an exhibition with my colleague Geoff Emberling. Focused on ancient graffiti at the site where we work in Sudan (El-Kurru), these projects have been fun. We’ve learned a lot by working on the book, and the exhibition has been an interesting exercise in how to share the story of El-Kurru and its graffiti with people who will probably never travel there.
Many exhibitions can display objects from a far-away archaeological site to tell a story, but in our case, we can’t transport the El-Kurru pyramid and funerary temple to Ann Arbor (although we can try to fake it). So it’s been a big challenge not only for us but for Scott Meier and Eric Campbell, our Kelsey colleagues who are responsible for the exhibition design, installation, and graphics.
Kelsey assistant exhibition designer Eric Campbell enhancing a photo of a graffito from El-Kurru for inclusion in the upcoming exhibition.
Last week I returned from a few weeks of work at the site of El-Kurru, Sudan, where a project directed by Kelsey Museum research scientist Geoff Emberling explores both an ancient royal cemetery of the Napatan kings and how an archaeological research project can connect with and celebrate contemporary cultural heritage in the community surrounding it. My time at El-Kurru this year was short but productive, and below are a few of the big highlights for me.
First, I got to work with conservation architect Kelly Wong on multiple projects, including conservation planning for the El-Kurru pyramid known as Ku. 1. This included a lot of fun investigation and problem solving, as well as mixing and testing of construction mortars. Our favorite mortar formulation was then applied to a joint in the pyramid to see how it will hold up over the next year. If you’re reading this as a conservator (or a mason) and thinking, But wait, isn’t that pyramid dry masonry? Yes, it is. But we have an interesting situation where the walls are moving in response to pressure from the rubble core, thus we’re testing different methods for stabilizing the outer masonry shell.
Conservation architect Kelly Wong (left) and I mixing test batches of mortar. Photo by Caitlin Clerkin.
Kelly at the Ku. 1 pyramid, preparing a joint for a mortar test. Photo by Suzanne Davis.
Second, IPCAA student Caitlin Clerkin and I recorded a series of short videos for an upcoming Kelsey exhibition — Graffiti as Devotion along the Nile: El-Kurru, Sudan. For these, we asked people to tell us either about their favorite ancient graffito at the site, or to share something they wanted people to know about the site. Each person had something different to say, things we probably would never have heard if we hadn’t been doing these videos! Among the people we talked to were Anwar Mahajoub and Bakri Abdelmoneim, both of whom work on the El-Kurru project but are also from El-Kurru village. They talked about growing up playing soccer within sight of the ancient cemetery and how they feel about their work now, as part of the international team working to study and preserve it.
Filming Anwar Mahajoub and Bakri Abdelmoneim in front of the Ku. 1 pyramid. Photo by Caitlin Clerkin.
Anwar and Bakri, in a still from the video. Photo by Suzanne Davis.
A third thing I really enjoyed was an afternoon spent baking bread with Marwa Mahajoub, Anwar’s sister. And yes, I do consider this conservation work! If bread isn’t an important form of cultural heritage to celebrate and preserve, I don’t know what is. Marwa has worked with the project for several years, and when Anwar discovered that a group of us were interested in baking, he volunteered her to teach us how she makes the bread for their family. Happily for us, she was cool with this. Bread is a big deal in Sudan — it’s not only your main carbohydrate at each meal, it’s also your utensil. Many people don’t have ovens at home and instead buy bread at one of several town bakeries, all of which use wood-fired ovens. Fresh bread out of one of these bakeries is fantastic but, as we discovered, the bread is even more delicious when it’s baked at home.
Marwa Mahajoub supervises as I shape bread for baking. Photo by Caitlin Clerkin.
Marwa pulls freshly baked bread out of her home oven. Photo by Suzanne Davis.
Sun setting across the desert landscape from the top of Jebel Barkal, with the pyramids in the midground.
15 February 2019
By Gregory Tucker
I was hoping to submit this last blog post on my time in Sudan, sharing some of our results, as I left the country on 21 December 2018, but unfortunately some rather significant events occurred and I had to leave the country early. On the 19th and 20th of December, protests erupted across the country with various motives that I will not focus on in this post, but I encourage you to read up about these events here and here. I was on my way to Khartoum during this period and while there I was advised to stay in the hotel and to leave the country on the earliest flight possible. In the end, I had no trouble at all leaving Sudan and saw no signs of the protests or their aftermath on the streets from the hotel to the airport, and I was very glad to arrive safely back home to news from my Sudanese friends and colleagues that they were all safe and in good health. Since I left, other research projects have continued to visit Sudan, such as the Uronarti Regional Archaeology Project, although the protests have continued off and on. These protests have recently resumed after a period of relative calm and I hope that the Michigan team now in Sudan stays safe and out of trouble!
The results of our survey work in December 2018 as part of the University of Michigan-led project!
In the image above, you can see the results of this season of geophysical survey and how it relates to the large Temple of Amun, visible in the left center of the image, and to the palm line to the lower right. This season of geophysics at Jebel Barkal was successful in defining a large number of archaeological features of interest, some of which are being investigated more intensively right now by other members of the project team on site. One of these is shown in more detail in the figure below, which zooms in on the center of the larger area of gray results in the larger image. What is most significant are the straight lines and right angles formed by the lighter and darker pixels, which reflect differing magnetic readings across the surface.
Results from the center of the survey area, showing rectilinear anomalies that likely define a buried structure, not visible on the surface.
More detailed results and analysis of this survey season will be published after thorough analysis, interpretation, and comparison with the excavation results. It was a fantastic field season, even with the hot weather at the beginning and the other obstacles we encountered. At times I didn’t think that we would complete everything we set out to do, but in the end we did even more than we targeted — a rare event in my experience!
A final selfie over the site from the top of Jebel Barkal, including the Temple of Amun in the foreground and the main survey area in the near distance to the upper left of the image.
Many thanks are due to the many people who made this fieldwork possible. First of all, I want to thank my assistants in the field, Bakri Abdelmonim and Abdelbaqi Salaheddin Mohamend, who I have worked with now for many years and whose experience and expertise make my job significantly easier. Thanks also to Sami Elamin, our NCAM (National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums of Sudan) inspector, who helped me to organize work on site as well as my day-to-day life while in Sudan, and who invited me to many social events in El Kurru and nearby towns and cities, including me as much as possible in the life of the region. Many thanks to everyone in El Kurru who welcomed me during the month of fieldwork and have always welcomed me — it feels like a home away from home when I am there. I would like to also thank our project’s overall director, Geoff Emberling (University of Michigan), for supporting my work from the very start. Hopefully we’ll make many more discoveries together. Finally, the greatest of thanks are due to Larry and Julie Bernstein for the financial support that made this work possible, we could not have done it without your generosity.
Camels on the highway on the trip back to Khartoum.
