Landscape and resource management in Bronze Age Sudan

I am very proud to announce the publication of a new volume of the ERC-funded DiverseNile Project: the copies of Landscape and resource management in Bronze Age Nubia: Archaeological perspectives on the exploitation of natural resources and the circulation of commodities in the Middle Nile, Contributions to the Archaeology of Egypt, Nubia and the Levant 17, Harrassowitz Verlag, 2024, edited by Rennan Lemos and me have just arrived and simply look great!

This volume is a direct result of many discussions held in the first DiverseNile seminar series organised by Rennan Lemos in 2021 as well as the second one in 2022, partly co-organised by Chloë Ward. The input of various colleagues working on several aspects of research extraction and management in ancient Nubia provided an opportunity to further develop an idea originally focused on gold into a collective effort to understand Nubian resource management in the Bronze Age. We are deeply grateful to all contributors to this volume, whose work illustrates the rich potential for a better understanding of how resources were extracted, managed, and utilised in complex ways in Nubia by various groups, including both Egyptians and indigenous communities, but also desert nomads. The table of content of the volume can be found here.

We are especially grateful to Manfred Bietak and the CAENL editorial board for accepting this volume for publication in their series and for organising the peer review. The publication was finalised in a difficult time for Sudan as a result of the conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces. As much as we are delighted to offer a further contribution to the investigation of ancient Sudan, we are also deeply concerned about the risks the people and the cultural heritage of Sudan are facing.

We fully support all our friends and colleagues in Sudan and would like to express our appreciation for their commitment to the preservation of the Sudanese cultural heritage in these extremely challending times. With the first anniversary of this terrible conflict and humanitarian tragedy approaching, it is timely to renew our concerns about and thoughts with the Sudanese people. Peace for Sudan!

DiverseNile Seminar Series 2022: Perspectives from landscape and resource management

We are very pleased to announce the DiverseNile Seminar Series for 2022. As a follow up of this year’s event, we will now focus on material culture and society in Bronze Age Nubia and respective perspectives from landscape and resource management.

It is my pleasure to open the Seminar Series on January 25 with an introduction and some ideas about global networks and local agents in the Middle Nile. Middle Nile contact space biographies we are currently reconstructing for the Attab to Ferka region provide a complex picture of a social space as a home to diverse groups and actors, rather than a static landscape and the periphery of centre-oriented narratives of New Kingdom Nubia. Our aim within the DiverseNile project is to decode, through our interdisciplinary studies, the economic role of the Attab to Ferka region for the principal centres, as a production area, and as land for animal husbandry and agriculture as well as for mining activities and gold production.

Rennan Lemos managed to gather a splendid group of speakers for the talks, covering a large set of topics from pottery technology to animal husbandry, gold extraction and much more.

We are looking much forward to this event and registration for the online DiverseNile Seminar Series 2022 is already open! Hoping to see many of you there – we will keep you updated about the specific schedule of the talks (always Tuesday, 1pm CET)!