The Mesolithic period on the White Nile region and the al-Khiday sites.

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]