The removal of those stones brought to light the real pit and the remains of the dead, a child whose bones were not only in a rather bad state of preservation, due to soil acidity, but resulted also disturbed by an animal burrow (Fig. 3). The child had no grave good apart from a necklace of faience and ostrich egg-shell beads (Figs. 4-5).
After the excavation of these cairns still some problem concerning their chronological attribution remain. The only means of dating them is by comparison.
The ceramic material furnishing the grave of cairn 13 of Cemetery 10-U-21 seems dating to a Late or Post-Meroitic period. Bowls similar to that found close to the head of the young archer, with a zigzag impressed decoration inside the rim, have been found nowadays in all the area from Geref, south of Khartoum, to Meroe. More problematic is the chronological indication offered by the necklace beads (Fig. 6).

Glass beads of this type have been found, for example, at Geili, north of Khartoum and are there dated to the Christian period. In the case of cairn 13, anyway, this typological elements are associated to others (faience beads) which are generally widespread in the Meroitic and Post-Meroitic period (Fig. 7).
To this same chronological sphere can be attributed the jar of cairn 1 of Cemetery 10-U-3, found associated with numerous faience beads (Fig. 8) and a granite archer-ring (Fig. 9).

As already mentioned in the previous briefing, cairn 2 produced only few fragments of pottery (Fig. 10) which, as it seems possible, are part of grave goods (but no trace of the dead was found!). They may indicate a date in the Meroitic period.
Cairn 3, as we saw above, produced only few beads which may also be attributed to the Late or Post-Meroitic period.
At this point we can come back to the White Nile where, in a rescue operation, we excavated a grave exposed along an erosive fault, not far from the Mesolithic site 10-X-6. The grave was visible along the section of this fault (Fig. 12). The excavation proved that the grave had been looted in ancient times. In the filling deposit we found, in fact, the remains of an adult thrown inside without any order (Fig. 13). At different levels, within the filling, we recovered numerous faience and ostrich egg-shell beads (Fig. 14) and two fragments of a bowl decorated with an impressed zigzag inside the rim (Fig. 15).

In a corner undisturbed by grave looters, on the base level of the grave and along its northern edge we found a group of iron arrowheads maybe still within a leather quiver (Figs. 16-17).

The material recovered in the grave suggests that it is probably contemporaneous of the cairns above described from cemeteries 10-U-21 and 10-U-3 even if the grave typology is much different. The meaning of this typological difference in graves which seem to be contemporaneous it is not a problem we can solve at the moment and it will be necessary to excavate a greater number of grave structures and earthen tumuli also considered of Late and Post-Meroitic period.
We still have to describe the excavation at the Mesolithic site 10-X-6 where the intrusion of the Meroitic period, deeply affected the prehistoric layers of the site. The mud-brick central structure, described in the previous briefing (Fig. 18) seems to cover a big oblong pit that can have been the grave or a corridor of access to a still buried grave chamber. The excavation anyway got ahead to reach the top of the most ancient layers, Mesolithic and Early Neolithic (Fig. 19), surely less disturbed than the upper ones and that will be investigated in the next field season.

To finish we want to illustrate the results of our survey, which was carried out in spite of the strong commitment to excavation activities.
In the most inner area, toward the Jebel, we located other Mesolithic sites, more funerary cairns (Fig. 20), and a number of tethering stones (Figs. 21-22) whose use has been described in these web pages.

Along the Nile we went further to the south of the limit reached in the past, recording important archaeological sites of different typology and chronology. Among these we would like to mention a large Post-Meroitic cemetery with earthen tumuli (Fig. 24), and a group of Mesolithic and Neolithic settlements, among which a low mound covered with stone fragments could be the place of a Mesolithic graveyard, as the surface evidence suggests. Close to this mound there are two big settlement areas (Fig. 25) that have produced Mesolithic and Neolithic materials (Figs. 26-30), but also, very interestingly, numerous fireplaces visible on the surface.