Revisiting Jebel Moya: Social and biological evolution in south-central Sudan (360G-Wellcome-090865_Z_09_Z)

Description of the project and its relevance Jebel Moya is a combined cemetery and settlement locality in the south-central Sudan which was excavated in the early 20th century by the founder of the Wellcome Trust, Sir Henry Wellcome. The excavation was overseen by different field directors, employing variable excavation, recording and surveying techniques, over the course of the four seasons from January 1911 - April 1914. Plans for further expeditions were first placed on hold by the outbreak of World War I and subsequently ended by Sir Henry's death in 1936. Around a fifth of the estimated 10.4 hectares of deposits were excavated. It still stands as one of the largest British excavations ever undertaken in Africa and one of the largest cemeteries yet excavated in North-East Africa. Overall, 2792 graves were excavated and recorded. A site report was eventually published by Frank Addison in 1949, followed by Ramkrishna Mukherjee, C. Rao and J. Trevor's 1955 analysis of the osteological remains. Limited re-analyses have since been conducted. Rudolf Gerharz (1994), Isabella Caneva (1991) and Joel Irish (2007). Gerharz only utilised the information contained in Addison's 1949 report, particularly the limited Registrar of Graves, to propose a new tentative chronology; he never re-examined any of the excavation records and materials firsthand. Caneva examined a small sample of pottery, curated at the British Museum, from the earliest settlement period. Irish looked at the remaining teeth to test Mukherjee's hypothesis on population heterogeneity. No previous study has re-examined the excavation records and materials to test the validity of the original site reports, and to re-analyse the social implications of the individual burial assemblages and distribution of graves. Furthermore, there has been no attempt to ascertain the probability of conducting radiometric dating on either the osteological or pottery remains, for example using Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (organic materials) and Thermoluminescence (inorganic materials, including pottery). My accompanying paper from Sudan & Nubia (2009) provides a critical overview of the previous publications mentioned above, details my investigations to date, demonstrates that there remains much information to glean from studies of the materials - both skeletal and associated artefacts - and presents preliminary ideas resulting from analysing the grave card data which I am cataloguing into the first ever electronic database for the site. In addition, I am re-examining the excavated grave, settlement and skeletal materials firsthand. The majority of the grave objects' positions are recorded on the grave and anatomical cards, and also in Addison's register of graves. These factors are also being entered into the database under together with data on the strata, attitude of the burials and the condition of the skeletal remains. Furthermore, Dr Kevin MacDonald (Institute of Archaeology, UCL) will be assisting me in the Petrie and British Museums to analyse the associated settlement and grave pottery which is of chronological, spatial and social interest; this has never been comprehensively undertaken before. Moreover, as a result of research presented at the May 2009 Sudanese Archaeological Research Society's conference (British Museum), Professor Abdel Rahman Ali extended an open invitation to visit the National Museum of Sudan (Khartoum) and work on the housed Jebel Moya materials which remain unstudied. The accompanying Table 1, derived from Frank Addison's registrar of graves in his 1949 publication, summarises the distribution of the artefacts from Wellcome's expedition which are primarily held in museums in Cambridge, Khartoum and London.I will also be using the information provided in the archived records on the skeletal and associated grave artefacts to reconstruct behavioural patterns, social structures and population histories. The previous Jebel Moya publications did not adequately integrate different subsets of data, resulting in an incomplete reconstruction of the social and biological transformations which occurred over the millennia. Theoretical modelling of social and biological evolution has advanced considerably in the 60 years since Addison's publication. Mortuary systems can provide information on social variability through analysing spatial dimensions, in comparison with biological and cultural affiliations: human (biological) bodies are loci of identity at individual and group levels, and are situated within the wider culturally constructed landscape. Places were defined and made significant not just by their physical location but also by materiality, including the skeletal remains. There are two additional avenues which my research encompasses: bone chemistry and DNA analyses. The human skeletal and faunal remains are curated in the Duckworth Laboratory, Cambridge, and some are in a condition where bone chemical analyses could be attempted. Such analyses, if successful, would help shed light on marriage patterns and possible migratory patterns by disentangling intra-site and regional relationships, and also provide information on diet. DNA would help test previous hypotheses of genetic closeness in, for example, the proposed elite cemetery from the late first millennium BC. Dr Tamsin O'Connell (Wellcome Trust Research Fellow, MacDonald Institute) and Professor Martin Jones (Department of Archaeology) will be approached for their assistance. A third avenue, that of disease, could be looked at as a possible future research question. Therefore, the interdisciplinary approach which I employ involves interpreting the relationships between mortuary behaviour, memory and material culture by utilising aspects of bioarchaeology (such as radiocarbon dating and isotopic studies), ethnography, Wellcome's expedition records and the archaeological artefacts housed in different museums. The re-examination of the nature of burial distributions will assist in establishing relative chronologies of graves, cultural histories, patterns of pastoral migrations and interactions with the surrounding regions. There is also the possibility of conducting radiometric dating on appropriate skeletal remains in order to arrive at a firmer chronology than what is currently available. These avenues for research are also detailed in the sub-section 'What can be done with the data' in my accompanying paper.