Sudan, Nilotic. A Brief History of Explorers and Archaeologists

Today the central African landscape west of the Nile River is hyperarid, with <10 mm annual rainfall; the modern Saharan region generally lacks sufficient surface water to sustain nomadic pastoralism, and settlement is localized around permanent oases and wells. The prehistoric records discovered in the desert landscape are sparse (Figure 1), and sites are commonly associated with ancient sources of water, including streams, springs, and lakes relict from ‘pluvial’ time periods of enhanced rainfall.

Figure 1. Location of key sites mentioned from the northeastern Sahara, an area covering 92000000 km, and including the Western Desert of Egypt, northwest Sudan, and the adjacent parts of Libya and Chad, which together are about the size of western Europe

Palaeoenvironmental evidence suggests that the region has remained arid with occasional semi-arid periods when the region received around 300 mm annual rainfall, and the Sudano-Sahelian vegetation zone extended northward. The changing climatic conditions and ready availability of water resources were key factors in determining when this marginal region could sustain life and cultural activities. The geoarchaeological record informs the emerging spatial and temporal reconstruction of the alternate aridification and peopling of the Sahara since the Later Pleistocene, the period -250000- 10 000 years ago.

A Brief History of Explorers and Archaeologists. Some of the first artifactual finds from the region called the ‘Western’ or ‘Libyan’ Desert and ‘the Sudan’ were documented by Ralph A. Bagnold and members of the Long Range Desert Group, a British army unit active during World War II.

In the 1930s, excavations on Lake Qarun-Fayum and the Kharga Oases by Gertrude Caton-Thompson and Elinor Gardiner provided the first integrated investigations into the prehistory and palaeoenvironment of the region; ironically these women were not granted membership into the Royal Geographical Society, although their reports have stood the test of time and paved the way for later researchers.

Field studies in the 1970s by the Combined Prehistoric Expedition discovered some important stratified sites of Middle Stone Age-Early/Middle Palaeolithic typology, which predate the last phase of glaciation. Aterian artifacts at the site at Bir Tirfawi, for example, are interstrat- ified with calcareous lake beds that likely date to the period 125 000-90 000 years ago. Farther to the north, the Dakhleh Oasis Project has studied the remains of several prehistoric periods (Aterian through Graeco-Roman) since the 1980s.

Acheulian hand ax finds older than 300 000 years were documented in the Bir Kiseiba and Selima Sand Sheet regions by Smithsonian Institution researchers conducting fieldwork in the 1990s. Today, various international teams of scientists continue to decipher prehistoric archives from the Gilf Kebir, the defunct former tributaries of the Nile in northern Sudan, the Tibesti and Fezzan, and the Niger and Chad Basin.

The Fossil Record. Although the Fayum is famous for its Oligocene fossil ape-like primates such Aegyptopithecus, no hominid fossils have been discovered from the broader region. Isolated Late Pleistocene lithic scatters and workshops exist, but related skeletal remains are extremely rare from Saharan North Africa. One of the most significant finds dating to the Middle Palaeolithic is an early anatomically modern human (H. sapiens sapiens) skeleton discovered along the Nile Valley -250 miles south of Cairo.

At Taramsa, an anatomically modern child (aged 8-10 years) was deliberately buried in an open-air chert extraction site, which places the skeleton in direct context with worked tools and the quarry rock. A series of optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dates from correlative eolian sands suggests an age for the burial between 49 800 and 80 400 years ago, with a mean age of 55 000. As one of the few well-dated sites in the region, Taramsa provides insight regarding origin of modern humans as preserved within the Nilotic region, one of the likely passageways ‘Out of Africa’ as modern humans dispersed from East Africa to Eurasia.