Antrhopologist digs ancient Sudanese bones
Arizona State University News
From the looks of the woman’s skeleton, she might have been in a serious car accident. But, the woman lived sometime between A.D. 300 and A.D. 600, so it was obviously not a crash that killed her.
The woman’s bones are among many recently excavated in northern Sudan – which, in ancient times, was called Nubia – by Brenda J. Baker, an associate professor of anthropology in the School of Human Evolution & Social Change. . . . The area where Baker is excavating is bordered by the Nile, with groves of date palms on one side and the desert on the other. All of this area will be under water when the dam is built and the reservoir fills in two or three more years.
“In the early 1900s, archaeologists looked at this area as devoid of occupation,” she says. “And, lo and behold, it’s chock full of sites.”
Baker is excavating cemetery sites, one of which is near a school in a village called Ginefab.
As the archaeologists worked at the site, the children lined up to watch, Baker says.
“On our trip in 2006, to lay the groundwork for the subsequent field seasons, Stuart and I learned that the school has 11 teachers for more than 300 students, and that they needed supplies,” she says. “So we took tablets, pens, pencils and even a world map in Arabic.”
Some of the tombs at the site are high and rounded, with rocks on top, and others are nearly level with the ground. Baker hopes to learn whether people with more social status were buried in the higher tombs, and how the people fit into the state-level societies in ancient Nubia.
The Kerma culture flourished in that area from 2500 B.C. to 1500 B.C., before its capital was sacked by the Egyptians, so Baker also hopes to learn whether the people in the Fourth Cataract identified more with the Kerma or Egyptian culture.
See the above page for more details.
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