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The presence of exotic materials in funerary contexts in the Sudanese Nile Valley suggests increasing social complexity during the fifth and sixth millennia BC. Amazonite, both in artefact and raw material form, is frequently recovered from Neolithic Sudanese sites, yet its provenance remains unknown. Geochemical analyses of North and East African raw amazonite outcrops and artefacts found at the Neolithic cemetery of R12 in the Sudanese Nile Valley reveals southern Ethiopia as the source of the R12 amazonite. This research, along with data on different exotic materials from contemporaneous Sudanese cemeteries, suggests a previously unknown, long-distance North African exchange network and confirms the emergence of local craft specialisation as part of larger-scale developing social complexity.Keywords: Sudan, Neolithic, amazonite, social complexity, exchange, IntroductionThe introduction of domesticates and the adoption of an agro-pastoral food-producing economy in the Sudanese Nile Valley were associated with new forms of social complexity (Salvatori et al. 2016). The [...]

Khartoum is one of the largest cities in Africa, located immediately south of the junction of the Blue and White Nile rivers in central Sudan. The growth of the Greater Khartoum-Omdurman conurbation arose – without a proper urban plan – from the agricultural wealth created through the completion of three dams, and mostly in the last three decades. Urban expansion was enabled by and helped to enhance the major agricultural expansion of the Gezira clay plains located to the south between the lower Blue and White Nile rivers. The region has been a focus of human settlement for at least 8,000 years, initially by semi-sedentary groups with a fishing-hunting-gathering lifestyle and later by Neolithic groups as shown by hundreds of archaeological sites. Today, Khartoum is a desert city, still very vulnerable to floods triggered by intense convectional storms. Such extreme events may become more common in future, representing a major geomorphological hazard. Moreover, uncontrolled urban and agricultural development is threatening most of the cultural heritage of the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The excavation at al-Khiday's Mesolithic and Neolithic sites, located along the western bank of the White Nile, 25 km south of Khartoum, provides a complex view of hunter-gatherer-fisher pottery-bearing communities inhabiting this region of Sudan during the early and middle Holocene. Their state of preservation, combined with special attention to site formation processes and a multidisciplinary approach to excavation and recording methods, has identified a settlement evolving from an ephemeral occupation into a village in which spaces were organised with different structures suggesting diversified functions and activities. Combined palaeoenvironmental, archaeological and bio-archaeological studies allow reconstruction of the transition from residential mobility to a nearly sedentary lifestyle and, in the later phase, a return to more mobile strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents the results of an archaeometallurgical study carried out on a set of samples of metal and metal-related objects collected by the Italian Archaeological Mission to Turkmenistan at the Calcolithic and Bronze Age site of Altyn-depe in 1998. Overview of the metal processing and alloying techniques; Map of excavations of Altyn-depe; Artifacts related to copper and lead metalworking from the surface of Altyn-depe.