Events tend to come thick and fast at the end of the year – as was the case with our latest article, which was fortunately published yesterday despite the public holidays.

We are happy to announce that the ‘Contact Space Biography’ concept developed as part of the DiverseNile project (see already my early blog post at the start of our project) is now available in article form and will hopefully be discussed – and useful to others. We developed this concept in order to reach a higher resolution understanding of cultural dynamics and diversity of ancient Nilotic groups, taken the Attab to Ferka region as a case study. We argue that areas like the MUAFS concession can be understood as complex social spaces intertwined with an often changing landscape.

We present our findings from the study of selected cemetery and settlement sites in Attab and Ginis. The following sites are discussed in our article: cemetery GiE 003; cemetery GiE 002 and the settlement sites AtW 001, AtW 002 and 2-T-53 (cf. other “stone villages” in Attab and Ginis West). These sites range in date from Middle Kerma to the Napatan period and allow to consider the local realities of cultural interactions in rural areas, away from “central sites” such as Amara West and Sai Island, showing clear changes from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. Read our article for more information!

Reference:

Budka, J., Aglan, H., & Ward,C. (2025). Reconstructing Contact Space Biographies in Sudan During the Bronze Age. Humans, 5(1), 1. https://doi.org/10.3390/humans5010001