Figure 1 – The main street in Kurru in the early morning hours before work. Waleed’s shop, where we buy snacks and supplies but most importantly bottled water, is on the left less than 100m from our front door and the barber shop, painted green, is right across the street! 14 Dec 2018 Gregory Tucker…
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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…
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Figure 1 – Jebel Barkal (photo taken during 2016 fieldwork) 30 Nov 2018 Gregory Tucker Welcome to the first of a series of blog posts that I plan on writing every Friday over the next few weeks for the Kelsey Museum’s #fieldworkfriday series! This happens to coincide perfectly with our rest day in the field,…
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(Left to right, sort of: Geoff Emberling, Martin Makinson, Rikke Therkildsen (she’s in the back), Nacho Forcadell, Jack Cheng (also in the back), Luis Martín Díaz, Kate Rose, Sebastian Anstis (in the back–he’s not really that tall), Carrie Roberts, Suzanne Davis, Martin Uildriks, Sarah Duffy, Naomi Miller, Jacke Phillips, and Mahmoud Suliman (he’s not really…
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It can be really difficult to get an excavation project into the field. You have to find funding, gather a group of good people, buy supplies, anticipate issues that might arise…and if it all comes together at the right time, the project can go forward. We are ALMOST there. Because of some complexities of grant…
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Another installment of answers to Ms. Donnelly’s 6thgrade class that have to do with life on the dig…. We live in a house in the village—here’s a photo of the outer courtyard, which is really a nice place to have a cup of tea in the afternoon, and we do a lot of work here…
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I received a nice note from Julie Donnelly, who teaches at Clague Middle School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her 6th grade students had a bunch of really good questions about the dig and about living in a village in Sudan. It turns out that 6th graders are pretty smart! I’m going to try to answer…
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This photograph was taken by Kathryn Howley, a graduate student at Brown who is a member of our team. She’s using a variety of advanced photographic techniques to document our work, including using software called PhotoScan to stitch together lots of kite photographs to produce 3-D models of the landscape around El Kurru. I’ll…
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The people in El Kurru belong to the Shaigiya tribe. They trace their ancestry back to an ancestor (Shaig) who lived several centuries ago. They are mentioned in European travelers accounts of the 19th century, when they sometimes raided caravans. In times before Shaig, people in this area were likely speakers of Nubian languages,…
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I tried something I’ve never done as an archaeologist: I went running while in the field. It was glorious and strange. I got up in the dark and started just as the morning star faded. I was almost completely alone the first morning: nobody out of their houses, no cars on the road, not even…
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