Figure 1 – Collecting magnetic data on our first day of survey at Jebel Barkal (photo by Abdelbaki Salahadin Mohamend).

7 Dec 2018

Gregory Tucker

This week for the #fieldworkfriday I would like to share with you a bit of where I am and what I’m doing in the field. This month I’ve come to Sudan’s Northern State, to the site of Jebel Barkal, near the Fourth Cataract of the Nile to conduct a geophysical survey in two distinct areas of the site.[1]

[1] Jebel Barkal and the nearby sites of El Kurru, Sanam, and Zuma are on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Figure 2 – Map of Sudan showing the location of Jebel Barkal.

Jebel Barkal is a small mountain not far from the Nile and was considered by the Egyptians and later the Kushites to be the home of the god Amun. Various temples, palaces, and pyramids were constructed at the site from the Egyptian New Kingdom (about 1500 BCE) to the end of the empire of Kush (about 300 CE), and these have been the targets of extensive excavation in modern times.[1]

[1] See jebelbarkal.org for a fantastic history of the site and its excavation.

Figure 3 – This image, that I took just yesterday, shows the amazing conservation work of the Italian-Sudanese team at the Mut Temple at Jebel Barkal. The image on the left has been cleaned and clearly shows Taharqa while the image on the neighboring wall on the right is still covered in soot.

 

Figure 4 – It is the tourism season in Sudan, as evidenced by the many vehicles bringing tourists to visit the site every day. Seeing this many together is rare, even this time of year!

One of the most efficient ways to explore a large landscape like that of Jebel Barkal in search of specific features that will help us understand how people lived in the past is geophysical survey. The results of this month of survey will help our projects better understand and interpret the built environment of the site, shedding light on how the community at Jebel Barkal lived and how it relates to other sites and their architectural traditions from the region.

This past week we finished up our work for the first project, on the south side of the mountain, where we were working in the desert landscape near the pyramids at the site. We were invited to survey this area by Murtada Bushara Mohamed of Sudan’s National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums (NCAM) as part of the Qatari Mission for the Pyramids of Sudan (QMPS) project.[1] This project is focused on research, preservation, and presentation of the pyramids at Jebel Barkal, Kurru, Meroe, and Nuri and our contribution will help us better understand the landscape context of these monuments by identifying the location of other structures in this region of Jebel Barkal.

[1] www.qsap.org.qa/en/pyramids-of-sudan

Figure 5 – The pyramids on the southern side of Jebel Barkal.

Tomorrow we will begin our work on the east side of the jebel, between the mountain and the Nile River, in an area we call the “East Mound”. This project is an offshoot of Geoff Emberling’s research at El-Kurru and the surrounding region, and during preliminary research conducted in 2016 we identified this mound as being a likely location for the settlement associated with the temples and palaces of the monumental core of the site.[1] We were able to identify buried structures here during a very short period of survey that year, just a couple of days, so we have returned to survey the entire mound and the surrounding area to better define the extent of this settlement.

[1] This research was undertaken thanks to a Waitt Grant from the National Geographic Society for my project: “Defining Settlement in the Nile Valley: Geophysical Prospection in the Region of Jebel Barkal, Ancient Napata”. See the reference to Geoff and my Sudan & Nubia article in the previous blog post for more about the results of this work.

Figure 6 – View towards Jebel Barkal from the “East Mound” as we begin to set up our equipment for the survey work in this area.

The type of prospection that I’m conducting can be done with many different instruments, each with its own unique method of collecting magnetic data. In the case of this project I am using a device that must be carried across the landscape and takes readings at a consistent interval.

The most efficient way to use this device is to set up a grid system in the area that I wish to cover. Here, we use 30m x 30m grids that we establish using a total station, and then walk up and down guidelines which we set on the ground to ensure that I walk straight and which are marked every meter to ensure that I walk at a consistent pace.

By telling the instrument and processing software the parameters of the survey the data can be plotted quite quickly to create a map of the magnetic readings at the surface, giving us insight into what may lay buried below. With this particular machine we are limited only by how fast I can walk while maintaining a consistent pace and holding the machine relatively steady, which depends on the surface conditions — sand slows me down quite a lot! — and how well we establish the grid and lay out the guidelines. I’ve made a short video which gives a first-person perspective of what walking one of these lines is like (in a typical day I can walk approximately 540 lines!).

[INSERT VIDEO HERE]

Video 1 – This short video offers a first-person perspective on collecting a line of magnetic gradiometry data.

Of course, there is slightly more to it than just that, but the bulk of my time here is spent walking along these lines and listening to the machine chirp at me, 30 meters at a time.

I realize that I did not check the comments on my last post to see if there were any questions, but I will be better about that this week, so please comment with any questions you may have or email me at gstucker@umich.edu. I would love to hear from you! And please check in next week for another update from Sudan!