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The statistics
of the R12 graveyard showed that the West-East body
orientation, with faces looking North, Northeast and
East, occurred much frequently (Fig. 11). The pattern
would indicate a clustering around the spring and summer
months of the year. In fact there are only a few graves
following the winter sunrise-sunset path so there is
a possibility that at least part of the group spent
the winter months in another place, maybe devoting this
period to animal grazing outside the basin and/or hunting,
and thus lowering the pressure on the agricultural flood
plain. Different lines of inquiry pointing to integrate
ideological behaviour to mating rules, as an explanation
of body orientation and deposition side, could be exploited
only at the end of the work by the physical anthropologist
on sex and age determinations.
In the end it is hard to figure out what they went to
search for in the more inner desert areas that they
could not find in the basin itself, and the archaeological
data does not help.
Grinding stones found in some graves may suggest that
seeds were also part of their diet. The presence of
some domestic wheat in one of the Kadruka cemetery graves,
located in this same region but more to the north ,
in the Kerma area, also seems to point to a form of
agriculture-based society.
Even though the subsistence system, and part of the
material culture, do not seem to change much in the
four hundred years of site use, this people, apparently
so static, seems to have concentrated variation on pottery
making. It is possible to distinguish at least three
different “style” phases, more or less confirmed
by the set of C14 determination at hand.
Most pots are fully or partially decorated except in
the last phase when the decoration is limited to the
rim of the pot. The shapes of the pots are also a very
distinguishable characteristic of this last phase even
if a certain differentiation started in the second identified
phase. Some decorative patterns seem to last longer
and merge in the following phase.
This study is only at its preliminary stage and this
sequence may need a lot of refinements.
The oldest graves excavated so far at R12 fall between
4900-4600 BC. The body of some pottery found in one
of the more ancient graves, was decorated with dotted
impressions running parallel to the rim or oblique to
it (Fig. 12). It is hard to understand how this impression
was produced after coating and burnishing were applied
to the surface. Rocker technique or cord impression
may have produced this pattern.
This decorative pattern continues until we reach the
undecorated pottery phase.
One of these graves produced the only clear Ripple Ware
Pot (Fig. 13). It seems that this kind of surface treatment
is elsewhere associated to such ancient dates. A particular
case is that of Kadruka 13, absolutely contemporaneous
with the R12 first phase.
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The second phase is marked by pottery
decorated with rocker zig-zag, plain or dotted, covering the
whole body, as the example found in Grave 136 dated between
4650 and 4550 BC, or limited to its upper part (Fig. 14).
Together with this decoration we see the appearance of the
simple combed impression, mostly arranged in a herringbone
pattern, limited to the upper part of the body as from the
pots found in Grave 138, dated between 4650 and 4450 BC (Fig.
15) or extended to all of it (Fig. 16).
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