The El Salha Archaeological Project update

Antiquity - Open Access (D. Usai & S. Salvatori)

Thanks to Francis Lankester for sending me to this link:

The El Salha Archaeological Project has been the subject of archaeological and geo-morphological reconnaissance and excavation in Central Sudan by the Is.I.A.O. (Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente) since the autumn of 2000. The name given to the project comes from the El Salha village which lies along the western bank of the White Nile at about 15km south of Omdurman (Figure 1). The two main goals of the project are the archaeological exploration of one the core areas of the Mesolithic and Neolithic cultures along the Nile Valley, scarcely known to date (Arkell 1949; Marshall & Adam 1953), and the emergency investigation of several large archaeological sites located along the Nile bank and in the interior in danger of destruction because of the rapid urban growth of the villages located south of Omdurman. . . .

During the 2002 season the team located an elongated mound, labelled 16-D-5 following the taxonomy proposed by F. Hinkel (1977: 24-6) on the western bank of the White Nile about 25km south of Omdurman (36 P 0436329/ UTM 1708138). Pot-sherds collected on the surface of the mound were partly indicative of the Khartoum Mesolithic (Arkell 1949) and partly the later Shaheinab Neolithic phase (Arkell 1953) of the Central Sudan sequence. In the winter of 2004, a test trench (5 x 5m) was excavated on the north-western slope of the 16-D-5 mound to verify the state of preservation of the anthropic layers which are often disturbed and subsequently mixed up by the succeeding construction of Meroitic and Post-Meroitic burial tumuli (Caneva 1995: 78; Usai & Salvatori 2006). This operation revealed that Neolithic and Mesolithic deposits had been disturbed to a depth of c. 60cm, almost certainly due to the building of a large Post-Meroitic tumulus, and at a depth of c. 60cm a Post-Meroitic pit grave appeared. The pit had been filled with a large amount of broken grinding stones under which was a Post-Meroitic Jar. The deceased was lying crouched on the right side, south-north oriented, in front of a beer jar covered by an overturned bowl.

See the above page for the full story.