The Best of Science and Nature Writing 2006 Damning Sudan / Archaeology Magazine
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The Land Rover is stuck, and the Manoosir tribesmen aren’t lending a hand. In Sudan, where African generosity meets Arab politeness, this means trouble. Even our easygoing Sudanese driver tenses. A few miles downstream from this dusty mud-brick town on a remote bend of the Nile River, Chinese engineers are building the massive Meroe Dam that as early as next year may flood the villagers’ homes, fields, and more than 100 miles of fertile valley. And archaeologists working to save what they can of this largely unexplored region before the waters rise are not welcomed by the locals. With our car and our equipment and our pale skin, we are harbingers of the end of their way of life. Unable to move forward through deep sand, we’re forced to back up through a narrow alley as it fills with silent and unsmiling onlookers. But hospitality overcomes animosity, and an old man directs us to another dusty street, which leads to a slightly more passable sand track and the open desert beyond. Our driver guns it out of town. We’d been told in Khartoum not to stop while passing through Manoosir territory. A few months earlier, anger erupted on nearby Sherri Island when tribesmen—many of whom will be forced to relocate to barren desert—led marches and burned offices belonging to the dam project. In April, less than a month after our visit, militiamen killed and wounded more protesters in a bloody shootout in nearby Amri. And this past winter representatives of the Manoosir, who live on a long swath of the riverbank, politely but firmly told archaeologists to stay away. Foreign and Sudanese excavators are taking that advice seriously, and they are not sure if they can return.
The Meroe Dam already poses a humanitarian crisis. It will displace more than 50,000 people who live along this isolated region of the Nile, growing dates and herding sheep and goats. But the project is also creating a cultural heritage disaster largely ignored by the international media, UNESCO, and private preservation groups. Thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of ancient sites are likely to vanish underwater as early as next year without even cursory examination.
That impending destruction comes just as a half-dozen Sudanese and foreign teams discover that the obscure region was not the backwater archaeologists long imagined. During the past few seasons of hurried salvage work, the teams pinpointed hundreds of settlements and cemeteries spanning four millennia, rock art depicting everything from Neolithic giraffes, to Greek crosses, to an ancient pyramid. “We thought it was inhospitable and poor,” concedes Derek Welsby, a British Museum archaeologist who has spent five seasons digging in the region and hopes to return this winter if the violence subsides. “But what we’re finding causes us to rethink that. This area is so incredibly rich in archaeology.”
Just getting here—300 miles north of Sudan’s capital Khartoum—illustrates why excavators have long ignored the region. Crammed into our Land Rover is Geoff Emberling, director of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute’s museum, his colleague Bruce Williams, Sudanese archaeologist Rihab Khedir, our driver Mohammad, as well as me and our camping gear. Emberling invited me to tag along on the spring visit as he searches for a place to dig in the coming season. After a day’s driving, the road gives out. The northward-flowing Nile makes a great bend here, twisting west and then south before straightening on its way into Egypt. The surrounding landscape is dramatic but barren, and the river in this section runs through the Fourth Cataract, a rocky stretch with rapids, shoals, and islands. Traveling along the cataract requires a sturdy truck and an experienced driver to cope with rocky plains, steep hills, and deep sand. A British-built railroad punctuated by nineteenth-century depots still crosses the region; when the sand becomes too deep, Mohammad hops the vehicle onto the tracks to make time. We jump off at the sight of a train hauling a heavily armored caboose, a sign of the tension that pervades the entire country. Countless lush date-palm groves, fields of wheat and barley, and small villages hug the river. The inhabitants lack electricity, phones, or cars, but the villages have a clean and prosperous feel. The Fourth Cataract initially drew Paleolithic and Neolithic hunters and gatherers in a wetter era, when the African savannah reached this far north. 
When the climate grew more arid, people settled along the river’s banks. In the first and second millennia b.c., the region was part of ancient Nubia, which served alternately as conqueror, vassal, and economic partner to Egypt, and as a critical link between sub-Saharan Africa and the Mediterranean, with its own proud indigenous culture. The more famous and accessible Nubian sites—such as the ancient capital of Napata, which flourished from the ninth to the third century b.c., and Meroe, its powerful successor, which predominated for the next 600 years—lie just upstream and downstream of the Fourth Cataract. Though the Meroitic kingdom disintegrated by the end of the fourth century a.d., leaving behind an undeciphered script, small Christian kingdoms in the region survived until about 1500. When archaeologists first examined the area in the nineteenth century, they focused on sites, including Meroe and Napata, with their royal burials (“The Other Pyramids,” September/October 2002). A century later, the Fourth Cataract remained largely unsurveyed and unexcavated.
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| President al-Bashir of Sudan, center, watches as dam project director Osama Abdalla and Qu Zhe, head of China’s Harbin enginering company, complete a $400-million deal to build a power plant at the dam. |
Talk of damming the Fourth Cataract goes back a half-century, so the actual start of construction caught both local residents and foreign archaeologists off- guard. For nearly 30 years, the Sudanese government has tried to jump-start the effort, but a brutal civil war in the south and the country’s dire financial straits kept the project on hold. But the discovery of vast reservoirs of oil in the late 1990s caught the attention of energy-hungry China. With its newfound oil revenues—largely from China—Sudan was able to begin the dam in earnest in 2003. It gave Beijing’s International Water and Electric Corp. the lead on the $1.5-billion project, with Germany’s Lahmeyer International and France’s Alstrom as key subcontractors. Despite the genocide in Darfur to the west, a peace treaty last year ending the north-south civil war, combined with the drive for oil development, has made officials in Khartoum eager to increase the desperately needed electrical capacity of Sudan. To them, the price of doubling that capacity—drowning a remote region inhabited by farmers and herders—seems small.
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| After their owners are paid compensation for them, the government burns palm trees in the area to be flooded to prevent farmers from harvesting dates. |
Once completed in 2008, the dam will rise 220 feet above the riverbed and stretch more than 5 miles across the Nile Valley, creating a lake more than 2 miles wide and 108 miles in length. The archaeological impact will not be limited to the flooded valley. Construction of massive transmission lines and relocation sites for displaced people will disturb large areas, and a planned network of canals radiating from the new lake will raise groundwater levels downstream, posing a hazard to a host of famous sites like Meroe and Napata. “It all seems very ominous,” says Timothy Kendall, a Northeastern University archaeologist with long experience excavating in Sudan.
Despite the enormous impact, international organizations such as UNESCO—which played such an important role in Egypt during the Aswan High Dam salvage efforts of the 1960s—are missing in action. In the late 1990s, the renowned French Egyptologist Jean Leclair took UNESCO officials on a field mission to drum up interest, but nothing came of it. Today, UNESCO instead is focused on building cultural heritage centers in devastated southern Sudan and in placing Napata and Meroe on the list of World Heritage Sites. When I met her in Khartoum, UNESCO representative Chiara Dezzi-Bardeschi was not aware of either the humanitarian or cultural heritage problems associated with the dam. Even if UNESCO were to get involved now, it would be too late to assist in the salvage. Though the dam won’t be finished until 2008, the waters will begin rising next summer.
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| Etchings reflect a changing climate: the elephant an earlier, wetter one, and the camel a later, drier one. |
| What’s Going Under
While the people of the Fourth Cataract region lacked the wealth, monuments, and political muscle of the inhabitants upstream and downstream, they appear to have been more intimately tied to the surrounding cultural currents than scholars had guessed. Rock art discovered along the river depicts giraffes and ostriches, a sign that early hunter-gatherers found the savanna of that period rich and hospitable. A 2005 expedition funded by London’s Sudan Archaeological Research Society and the British Institute in Eastern Africa uncovered two Paleolithic sites with thousands of flakes and cores, which may have produced material for long-distance trade.
In the fourth millennium b.c., dryer conditions concentrated the population in the river valley, and agricultural societies developed up and down the banks of the Nile. The Kerma culture—named after the settlement just above the Third Cataract—began to emerge in 2500 b.c. Archaeologists long thought this culture never had an impact farther upstream, in the Fourth Cataract. But to their surprise, a team led by Derek Welsby of the British Museum found remains from early Kerma, which lasted until 2050 b.c. A team led by Henryk Paner of the Gdansk Archaeological Museum working on the Nile’s right bank also uncovered extensive Kerma remains from the era that began about 1700 and lasted until 1550 b.c., at an astonishing 90 sites, including 30 cemeteries. One settlement located near the villages of Argub and Khosh covered 150 acres and boasted stone buildings and Egyptian pottery imports, as well as locally made pots in a Kerma style. Though apparently lacking major urban centers, the area clearly was tied to the Kerma culture and its trading network.
Material recovered from the later Napatan and Meroitic periods is sparser. But Welsby’s team discovered a pyramid with an offering chapel and enclosure wall near the village of el-Kenisa typical of those built between the eighth and fifth centuries b.c. The structure is 18 feet square and would have risen 18 feet high, with a capstone of yellow Nubian sandstone quarried from a site more than 30 miles away. The area appeared to revive in the early centuries a.d. Working on the Nile’s left bank near the town of Hamdab, a team from Sudan’s National Corporation of Antiquities and Museums (NCAM) found a large post-Meroitic cemetery.
Digs by NCAM and foreign teams also reveal a surprisingly vibrant Christian period, which lasted for a thousand years after the collapse of Meroe. A host of medieval Christian forts dot the river, remnants of small kingdoms that fended off each other or the Muslim tide that followed the Nile upstream. On Us Island last season, Humboldt University’s Claudia Naesser excavated a small late-thirteenth-century church complete with intact altar, baptismal font, and a foundation inscription consecrated in Greek to Jacob and Mary. The inscription includes an unusual ending that might be a rare remnant of Old Nubian, Naesser adds. Such a structure, along with its adjacent cemetery, provides critical new evidence about a largely unknown period. “No one knows the role of the Fourth Cataract in late Christian times,” she says. “But clearly there was a very active community life.” She hopes next season to examine another larger church, which appears fortified and could be a medieval monastery, on nearby Sur Island.
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While the people of the Fourth Cataract region lacked the wealth, monuments, and political muscle of the inhabitants upstream and downstream, they appear to have been more intimately tied to the surrounding cultural currents than scholars had guessed. Rock art discovered along the river depicts giraffes and ostriches, a sign that early hunter-gatherers found the savanna of that period rich and hospitable. A 2005 expedition funded by London’s Sudan Archaeological Research Society and the British Institute in Eastern Africa uncovered two Paleolithic sites with thousands of flakes and cores, which may have produced material for long-distance trade. In the fourth millennium b.c., dryer conditions concentrated the population in the river valley, and agricultural societies developed up and down the banks of the Nile. The Kerma culture—named after the settlement just above the Third Cataract—began to emerge in 2500 b.c. Archaeologists long thought this culture never had an impact farther upstream, in the Fourth Cataract. But to their surprise, a team led by Derek Welsby of the British Museum found remains from early Kerma, which lasted until 2050 b.c. A team led by Henryk Paner of the Gdansk Archaeological Museum working on the Nile’s right bank also uncovered extensive Kerma remains from the era that began about 1700 and lasted until 1550 b.c., at an astonishing 90 sites, including 30 cemeteries. One settlement located near the villages of Argub and Khosh covered 150 acres and boasted stone buildings and Egyptian pottery imports, as well as locally made pots in a Kerma style. Though apparently lacking major urban centers, the area clearly was tied to the Kerma culture and its trading network. Material recovered from the later Napatan and Meroitic periods is sparser. But Welsby’s team discovered a pyramid with an offering chapel and enclosure wall near the village of el-Kenisa typical of those built between the eighth and fifth centuries b.c. The structure is 18 feet square and would have risen 18 feet high, with a capstone of yellow Nubian sandstone quarried from a site more than 30 miles away. The area appeared to revive in the early centuries a.d. Working on the Nile’s left bank near the town of Hamdab, a team from Sudan’s National Corporation of Antiquities and Museums (NCAM) found a large post-Meroitic cemetery. Digs by NCAM and foreign teams also reveal a surprisingly vibrant Christian period, which lasted for a thousand years after the collapse of Meroe. A host of medieval Christian forts dot the river, remnants of small kingdoms that fended off each other or the Muslim tide that followed the Nile upstream. On Us Island last season, Humboldt University’s Claudia Naesser excavated a small late-thirteenth-century church complete with intact altar, baptismal font, and a foundation inscription consecrated in Greek to Jacob and Mary. The inscription includes an unusual ending that might be a rare remnant of Old Nubian, Naesser adds. Such a structure, along with its adjacent cemetery, provides critical new evidence about a largely unknown period. “No one knows the role of the Fourth Cataract in late Christian times,” she says. “But clearly there was a very active community life.” She hopes next season to examine another larger church, which appears fortified and could be a medieval monastery, on nearby Sur Island. National Corporation of Antiquities and Museums (NCAM), a government organization based in Khartoum that oversees archaeology. Thanks to NCAM’s urgent pleas, small teams of Polish, German, Hungarian, British, and American—as well as Sudanese—archaeologists began surveying and excavating over the past five years. To entice the foreigners, NCAM’s leaders took a bold step. Foreign archaeologists could take home half of the museum-quality goods, aside from those that are unique, as well as nearly all the potsherds and animal and human bones they uncovered. Such exports are difficult if not impossible in most of the Near East and northern Africa today, so the prospect of a scientific and collection bonanza made it easier for researchers to raise money to pay for their digs.
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| A Greek text on a foundation brick excavated at an early church site identifies the sanctuary as the Church of Jacob and Mary, mother of God. |
Such enticement is necessary. Nubia itself was long considered by archaeologists to be peripheral, a poor cousin to ancient Egypt, and the Fourth Cataract was on the margins of that margin. More recently scholars have begun to reenvision Nubia as a remarkably long-lasting society that was a key player during more than three millennia of war, diplomacy, and trade in the Mediterranean and eastern Africa. Welsby and others working on the salvage effort say the evidence gleaned during recent seasons paints a much more complex picture. For example, a team led by Henryk Paner of Poland’s Gdansk Archaeological Museum, working on the Nile’s right bank, cataloged 711 sites—from Paleolithic to Islamic—in its 2003 season alone (see “What’s Going Under,” page 39). The eagerness of the archaeologists to explore this region fully is being thwarted not just by international indifference, but by violence and bloodshed. Thousands of small farmers, mostly members of the Hamadab, Shagiya, and Manoosir tribes, who eke out a living tending date palms and small fields and herding goats and sheep, face imminent eviction. Though the Sudanese government is building new housing for the displaced, much of it is on barren land far from adequate supplies of water. “There is nothing there,” says Kendall, who visited one new development. “There are mud-brick cubicles by the thousands in the middle of the desert that are absolutely horrific.”
The Manoosir tribe has been particularly outspoken in insisting that they be allowed at least to resettle on the banks of the new lake, and government officials say that some will be permitted to remain along the Nile. But last November, Chinese engineers refused locals access to a well; when livestock died as a result, a riot ensued. And in April three farmers were killed and 50 injured in the town of Amri along the river. Conflicting reports by news organizations and humanitarian groups say that government soldiers or armed militiamen opened fire on protestors gathered at midday at the town school. The increased tension and outbreaks of violence prompted senior members of the Manoosir tribe to ask archaeological expeditions to leave their territory this past winter. In November, Manoosir representatives warned a Warsaw University team that they were not safe, so they cut their season short. And Claudia Naesser, director of excavations for Berlin’s Humboldt University, had only been at her site for one week in February when she got wind of a meeting of Manoosir elders in the nearby market village of Salamat to discuss whether her group would be permitted to stay. At a small flour shop where a dozen of the Manoosir leaders had gathered, she showed a film about the dam project and the Manoosir that aired in Germany, as well as a website her team developed that provides ethnographic data on the tribe. Outside the little shop, she recalls, “hundreds of people were trying to find out what was going on inside, and jostling to catch a glimpse of the images on the laptop.” But the elders had already voted to ask her team to depart. “They had a stupid idea that by preventing archaeologists from doing their work, they will prevent the completion of the dam and the flooding that will follow,” she says. She could not convince them that halting archaeology would have no impact on the dam’s schedule. The Manoosir insisted that the team go, arguing that it would be dangerous for them if a foreigner were hurt and they were blamed. Naesser says that she respects their decision, saying that “what happens to the people is more important than what happens to the archaeology.” She hired a truck and moved her dig to Mugrat Island upstream, an area that will not be affected by the dam. Other archaeologists likewise are moving their operations away from the areas certain to be inundated. Emberling of the University of Chicago, for example, received a concession in Manoosir territory. But when we arrived in Khartoum, NCAM officials warned it would not be safe to work there. Instead, we examined an area at the far upstream end of the future lake, where a team from the University of California at Santa Barbara led by Stuart Smith has been working without incident since 2003. Whether and when the area is in danger of flooding, which would make it a priority, is unclear. “There are no reliable models for how quickly the lake will rise,” explains Naesser.
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| An archaeologist excavates an early Christian burial in a cemetery site that will be flooded as early as next year. |
Even the villagers who live there are uncertain. In Ginefab, a small town on the north bank, an elder in a thin cotton robe offered to lead us on an afternoon stroll through the date-palm plantations that stretch down to the fast-moving river. Every family has 70 or 80 date palms, he explained through an interpreter as we walked through the cool grove. He expects the water to rise perhaps as high as it does during the biggest annual Nile floods, which would ultimately drown the trees, but he doesn’t expect the flooding to occur for seven or eight years. In a neighboring town, however, a farmer complained that “the government has not told us anything,” and in a third village downstream called Al Qir, another farmer said he would be happy to move if he received compensation. While I’m chatting with that farmer, Emberling and Williams excitedly crisscross one of his fields along the banks of the Nile. They quickly turn up flints and sherds that hint at occupation from Neolithic to Christian times. But this evidence may be gone by winter; the farmer has recently plowed up a field that likely was also part of the site. Even if it is still intact, the lack of roads and supplies in the region makes any expedition a trial. “Doing justice to this area is going to be tough,” says Emberling. “The logistics are just so hard.” And if the government resettles the locals, it may prove hard to find the labor needed to assist in excavations. How much will be lost in the impending inundation is anyone’s guess. Welsby says there are many thousands of sites to be studied, and adds that the restrictions posed by the resettlement fracas will certainly mean that a large number will vanish before even surveys can be done, much less excavations. Each salvage team is taking a different approach; some are making broad surveys, while others, like Welsby’s, are focusing on a few promising digs.
NCAM’s Abdelhai Abdelsawi, deputy field director of the Fourth Cataract effort, says he is confident that an agreement will be reached and the violence will subside by autumn. Meanwhile, however, the dam’s construction is moving ahead, whether or not there is a deal. Abdelsawi says flooding will start in August 2007, though it will be not until 2008 or 2009 that large sections are underwater. With time short and larger forces at work, archaeologists are watching closely to see what they can rescue before it is too late. “I just don’t know what will happen, and whether they will agree to let us return, but I’m not very optimistic,” says Claudia Naesser. Whether or not the salvage teams resume their work, however, the Fourth Cataract—after a brief emergence into the archaeological limelight—seems destined to slip back into obscurity, this time for eternity.
