Wadi Muqqadam, Bayuda Desert, Sudan:
Roadline Survey of the Sudan Archaeological
Research Society, October 1997.

For three weeks in 1997, four archaeologists from Britain and an archaeologist form the National Museum in Khartoum carried out survey along the 237 km length of a planned roadline connecting Khartoum to the great bend in the Nile. As construction of the road had already begun it was hoped to locate and record archaeological sites along this course in order to obtain preliminary information about this previously unexplored region and to choose sites deserving of preservation and future detailed investigation. In the dry desert heat (regularly reaching afternoon temperature of 40 degrees centigrade we walked the desert within 500 meters on either side of the roadway to map sites and collect samples of archaeological surface materials. Some 192 sites were located in all, including one Lower Palaeolithic locality and two important Early Holocene sites with evidence for the earliest ceramic industry of the Sudan (wavy-line ware, ca. 7000-5000 BC). Evidence from mollusc remains at these sites indicates a much wetter environment with at least seasonal water in the bed of the Wadi Muqqadam. Most other sites were cemeteries from later periods, probably including the first millennium BC and the first millennium AD, i.e. the period of the Napatan-Meroitic Kingdom of the Sudan. The bulk of the evidence indicates that there were periods in the past when the Wadi was more intensively occupied than today.

View of modern camel-pastoralist settlement in the sparsely vegetated Wadi Muqqadam.

View of site 61.3, a cemtery of low tumulus graves,
probably for the early first millennium AD,
which overly an Early Khartoum Traditiion settlemeny (6th millennium BC).

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