Ceramic manufacturing techniques and cultural traditions in Nubia from the 8th to the 3rd millennium BC: Examples from Sai Island (Cambridge Monographs in African Archaeology)

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Description

In Sudan the first ceramic containers gave the impression initially of the 9th millennium BC, with the earliest dates c. 8700 BC from Sorourab 2, in Central Sudan, and c. 8600 BC from the district of Amara West, in Northern Sudan. This book presents a comprehensive important analysis of diverse ceramic assemblages from Sai Island, within the Middle Nile Valley of Northern Sudan, at the border between ancient Upper and Lower Nubia. The assemblages included on this study cover about five millennia, spanning the period c. 8000 to c. 2500 BC. They go from the initial appearance of ceramic technology within hunting-fishing-gathering communities living in permanent or semi-permanent settlements (in the neighborhood named ‘Khartoum Variant’ or ‘Mesolithic’ horizon: c. 7600–4800 BC), in the course of the ceramic productions of the first ‘Neolithic’ pastoral societies (Abkan horizon: c. 5550−3700 BC), to those of the Pre-Kerma Nubian culture (c. 3600−2500 BC). A thorough stylistic macroscopic commentary of the finds is integrated with a solid technological approach by the use of archaeometric petrographic (OM), mineralogical (XRPD) and chemical (XRF) analyses. Data are discussed and compared across a broad geographical area, including Lower and Upper Nubia, Central Sudan and the Egyptian Western Desert. They provide an original synthesis and interpretation of the ceramic traditions in Nubia and Sudan and propose a important review of the debate at the invention of pottery and the functional and cultural reasons for the emergence of the ceramic technology.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Introduction

1. Nubia and its cultural sequences between the 8th and the 3rd millennium BC: Khartoum Variant, Abkan and Pre-Kerma

2. Sai Island: archaeological research and cultural sequence

3. Ceramic productions on Sai Island: analysis of the macroscopic data

4. Archaeometric analysis

5. Comparing chaînes operatoires: continuity and discontinuity within the ceramic assemblages of Sai Island

6. The Sai Island sequence and the Nubian and Sudanese traditions

Bibliography

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