Claudia Näser, the lead researcher of this publication project, together with Jens Weschenfelder, the author of the envisaged publication, joined the Merowe Dam Archaeological Salvage Project upon invitation by the National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums of Sudan in 2003. She took on a concession consisting of several islands in the upstream part of the prospective flood area of the Merowe Dam, the largest hydropower project on the African continent in the early 2000s.
An extensive archaeological survey of the concession area, which at that point was an archaeological blank, established a continuous occupational history from the Late Palaeolithic up to the present. In four field seasons, 328 sites were recorded. Major site types are settlements and burial grounds, attested from the Neolithic, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age and the Medieval period; the latter including two Medieval churches. Rarer site types comprise, among others, knapping sites, gold mining sites, pottery deposits, and what may have been hunting installations.
The publication of this corpus of data, one of the largest of its kind, is important for various reasons. First, many sites have irretrievably been lost in the reservoir lake of the Merowe Dam. The publication will be their sole surviving record and the only way to preserve the (pre)history of the region for public and academic reference and study. The project will provide a comprehensive analysis of the occupation history of the study area, characterizing it in terms of intensity, land use strategies, symbolic perceptions and appropriations of natural environments and cultural landscapes. Presenting the richness and diversity of past human activity in an area which is generally considered a culturally marginal part of the Nile Valley will advance the understanding of past cultural dynamics in the wider study region. Finally, a critical analysis of the methodological approach and the results of the project will expose the challenges of salvage archaeological projects. This in turn can help to inform the planning of future salvage programmes in the Nile valley and beyond.
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