Bottom right: Settlement remains at Sayala Area G (Bietak 1966, pl. Bottom left: Remains of a dwelling structure SJE Site 194, Faras East (Säve-Söderbergh 1989, pl. Top right: Reconstruction of hut from Aniba (Steindorff 1935). Top left: Hut remains from Aniba (Steindorff 1935, pl. The assumption is that these stone-built structures formed footings for walls and roofs made from perishable materials such as wood, matting, or animal hides. In some cases, these stone footings are carefully built from standing slabs, the gaps in between filled with smaller stones, and the whole lined with mud plaster (fig. In contrast, many sites dated to the Middle Nubian period incorporate courses of large stones that mark out the footprint of the structures. This certainly seems to apply to some Nubian sites, especially those dated to the Early Nubian period, which are often little more than surface scatterings of pottery sherds, lithics, and hearth remains. The first point I discussed was the assumption that small Nubian habitation sites were often badly preserved because the communities that built them were seasonally mobile and hence only used ephemeral materials for temporary structures.
Thankfully – and not surprisingly – these ideas continue some of the same themes from the InBetween Project, namely that it revises some old assumptions about ancient Nubia that have become rusted into the literature. The discussion happened a little earlier in my project than I’d anticipated so I could only present very preliminary ideas, which I’ll outline below and in future posts. The good news is that a few interesting things have emerged, prompted largely by my participation in a discussion panel (with Nadine Moeller and Julia Budka) for the Being Egyptian project, organised by Linda Hulin and Thais Rochas da Silva.
Truth be told, I’m still wading my way through the data and often find myself staring at whatever maps and photos I can find hoping that inspiration will come. In the end, we know a lot about how ancient Nubian communities buried their dead, but we don’t know much about how those same communities lived. Even accounting for such extenuating circumstances, the result is that we have an archaeological record that is heavily skewed toward mortuary data, and where settlement evidence does exist it is usually from large sites like Kerma and Wadi es Sebua, both of which should not be taken as ‘typical’. In certain cases, for example the Scandinavian Joint Expedition to Sudanese Nubia (SJE), numerous habitation sites were identified but because of time pressure (it was a salvage project after all!) more time was given to the better preserved and materially more rich cemeteries. Reports are correspondingly brief, largely descriptive, and maps or photographs are few and far between. Often these sites are little more than surface scatterings of pottery sherds, lithics, and perhaps a single course of stone or bricks that mark out the footprint of built structures, assuming that there was any such structure in the first place. In the majority of cases, the habitation sites that I’m looking at are usually quite badly preserved or they are published only very briefly. The data isn’t bad as such, but it’s state is a product of the nature of the material that I’m trying to work with. So while quantity of data isn’t proving a problem, the quality of that data is often less than ideal. So many that I may need to refocus the project so that it remains manageable, but we’ll see. So, for now I’ve been trawling through publications and collating information on all of the habitation sites I can find. There were plans to do a bit of travel to gather some data, but of course that hasn’t yet been possible. Living Nubia has been underway since March and things are going well, if a little slower than hoped. Add to that an increasing level of irritation with some of the stuff going around on social media and the world generally, and I found myself needing to take some down time. Motivation was (and still is) hard to find, and while I haven’t been un-productive, that productivity has been a little slower than usual. But I guess my situation was like that of a lot of people – a long winter in lockdown after a year in an out of lockdown coupled with an extremely busy start to 2021 (while in lockdown!) started to take its toll.
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