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Future El Salha project prospects
The El Salha archaeological project reached its fifth year
of activity. While mainly oriented to rescue archaeology in
an area which is under pressure of a strong urbanisation process
and almost completely forgot by archaeological research, it
has never abandoned its scientific targets like the study
of Mesolithic/Neolithic transition and the population dynamic
in Central Sudan.
Being part of an huge ecological and cultural system –
the Nile Valley – Central Sudan is an area of particular
interest where to study some key phenomenon in the humankind
history like the adoption of pottery vessels, the process
towards sedentism among hunter-gatherer societies, animal
domestication and herding and sheep-breeding, and, finally,
the rising of agriculture with sorghum domestication.
Though sixty years are elapsed since the first prehistoric
excavation in Central Sudan by the British archaeologist A.J.
Arkell at the Khartoum Hospital site, archaeological research
failed to provide enough data to a complete and organic picture
of the prehistoric economic and cultural process in the area.
Although archaeological research of the middle of the last
century in Central Sudan and particularly in the Khartoum
area set the prehistoric discipline foundation in the Sudanese
Nile Valley this area is up to date one of the less known
of the area.
Rescue archaeology in northern Sudan in the sixties, under
the pressure of the Aswan dam construction, brought a dramatic
increasing of archaeological research in northern Sudan (Nubia).
As a consequence of the important and massive discoveries,
both of prehistoric an historic times, the archaeological
investment was centred in the Nubian area and to a lesser
extent to the Nile Valley North of Khartoum.
Very few researchers ventured to the south of the Sudan capital
along the White Nile, which, on the contrary, is emerging
as a key area to understand prehistoric society complexity
along the Nile Valley and beyond.
It is important to remember that cultural innovations brought
by Mesolithic groups of Central Sudan are largely spread along
the Nile Valley between the mid 8th and the end of the 7th
millennium BC.
On the base of the data at hand it seems that Nubian groups,
after accepting cultural innovations and stimuli from the
south, in a span of about one thousand years worked out new
social and economic systems which opened the way to the Kerma
State formation.
If the “Neolithic Revolution” was induced by contacts
with the Near East or the result of a slow process of animal
and plant control is still a matter of debate, but it is sure
that since the 6th millennium BC Nubia was inhabited by groups
practising cow herding and sheep-rearing. To the south of
Nubia it seems that the transition from a hunter-gatherer
economy to a food production one arrived at list one millennium
later. However the scanty archaeological data we have from
Central Sudan suggest to go forward warily on this ground.
The generally very bad state of preservation of the sites
along the Nile (see the 10-X- 6 site as an example) and the
lack of properly excavated sites make difficult to draw any
definite picture of the Mesolithic to Neolithic transition
in the central area of the country.
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