Arriving at Kasura was like to go back at home. The streets paved with sand, the white walls, the date palm gardens (Fig. 1),the smiling and joyful children which greeted us driving into the village. This season we are more numerous then in the past and thus we decided to look for a bigger house (but we will miss the garden of the house we rented in 2000 and 2001!). We were lucky because the house usually rented by our colleagues of the Sudan Archaeological Research Society, which are excavating the ruins of the Kushite town of Kawa, a huge archaeological site few km south of Kasura along the Nile right bank, was free.
One day was spent to tidy the house and the working rooms; to recover from a local storehouse our stuff; to make the kitchen and the dining room ready (an open patio poorly lit at night by a hanging bulb) (Fig. 2); to wash up kitchenware and cutlery crated two years before at the end of the last excavation campaign; to reassemble the beds (a modern variant of the traditional wooden angareeb made with iron and plastic strings) and place them in the garden because of the still hot mid October temperature (Figs. 3-4) that made really impossible to slip inside the rooms; to put at work the water filters and fill the special earthen jars which work as refrigerators for the bottles of filtered water.
All these operations are for us like a nice play and in any case it is the only way we have to build up a pleasing and functional environment as a starting point for a work which will last for the next two months, but also as a resting place after the long hours spent in the field digging under the sun.

The next day, after engaging the workmen which will help us in the excavation, we crossed again the Nile to buy food supply at the market in Dongola. On our side of the river there is only a small market were it is possible to by vegetables, fruits and, sometime meat. We will go daily to this small market place, but it will be impossible to find here all we need. On the contrary, in Dongola you can get almost everything. On the main street you have any kind of shops and along parallel roads skilful workmen can build whatever furniture you need. We arrived to the Nile bank were an old ferry was ready for his daily work transporting from one bank of the river to the other buses, trucks, cars, carts, camels and other animals and swarm of people going to sell or buy something in Dongola (Figs. 5-6).
In a couple of days we were ready to start again our work at the R12 Neolithic graveyard we firstly approached in November 2000. Arriving at the site we immediately perceived the strength of wind erosion. The slopes of the mound were covered with pot and human bone fragments. The bones were white in colour as usual when they are exposed for a period to the sun rays. In the twenty months elapsed since our last excavation campaign several graves were exposed by atmospheric agents (rain and wind) and their content more or less chaotically broken and scattered along the small mound slopes.
Our activity was concentrated on recording and collecting the surface materials (Figs. 7-8), in an effort to understand the dispersion pattern and to locate those graves which, though disturbed by wind erosion, could furnish data and information useful to our study.

In spite of the climate that was not friendly to us during the first weeks of work (the wind assailed us every day with chronometric accuracy between 9 and 9.30 a.m., filling our eyes with sand and often making our grave cleaning useless!) we have cleaned almost thirty graves. Some of them were furnished with pottery vessels (Fig. 9) and instruments like small stone axes, granite palettes (Fig. 10), or carved hippopotamus teeth used as containers for cosmetic powders, granite mace heads, bone spatulas, ivory bracelets (Fig. 11), rings and pendents. The high grave density, at least in some of the cemetery areas, has produced, if possible, more damage than wind erosion. One of the many examples we can mention is provided by grave 67, 69 and 71. Two of these were badly damaged by grave 71 pit, while grave 69 was even disturbed by grave 60 which we excavated two years ago (Fig. 12).