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 ---
 title: "A Book review of: The homescapes of the Manasir. A book review of: Welsby, Derek A. (ed.),
 *Archaeology by the Fourth Nile Cataract. Survey and Excavations on the
 Left Bank of the River and on the Islands between Amri and Kirbekan.
 Volume I: Landscape, toponyms and oral history and the people, their
 settlements, architecture and land use before the Merowe Dam* \[=Sudan
 Archaeological Research Society Publication Number 26\], London 2023.
 Pages 248 (thereof, 3 in Arabic) + xxxii."
 authors: ["alexandrostsakos.md"]
 abstract:
 keywords: ["Book review", "MDASP", "Fourth Cataract", "Derek Welsby", "Sudan", "Manasir"]
 ---
 Alexandros Tsakos, University of Bergen
 The volume at hand is, as stated in its summary (pp. xxx-xxxi), "the
 ﬁrst of several which will present in detail the results of the research
 undertaken by the Sudan Archaeological Research Society (SARS) as a part
 of the Merowe Dam Archaeological Salvage Project (MDASP)". By this
 statement alone, one should welcome most warmly this publication, since
 it is launching a series of volumes that will make public the immense
 data collected during the MDASP since the completion of the project in
 2007. SARS has announced five more volumes (p. xxx), i.e. vol. II:
 Gazetteers of sites discovered; vol. III: The excavations; vol. IV: The
 artefacts; vol. V: Bioarchaeology; vol. VI: The rock art and rock gongs.
 The publication of the first volume encourages us to hope that MDASP
 will not repeat the mistakes of the Aswan High Dam Campaign in the 1960s
 that, despite the eﬀorts of some missions,[^1] remain largely
 unpublished. We await a third generation of Nubiologists to complete the
 task of completing those publications. And of course, trusting that SARS
 will complete their own mission's task, they will have set a good
 example for those responsible for the other concessions awarded during
 the salvage campaign.
 This project's oﬃcial birth took place in London in May 2003 during the
 annual SARS colloquium at the British Museum. The project aimed to
 salvage the cultural heritage of the lands upstream from the Fourth
 Cataract, an archaeologically very little-known region that would be
 ﬂooded by the then largest hydroelectric project in Africa, the
 so-called Merowe Dam. The idea for a dam in that region was ﬁrst
 proposed in 1943, but the plan only materialized half a century later
 and after a lot of dramatic political changes in Sudan, as well as
 technical and logistical updates to the original scheme. Appeals for
 salvage campaigns were ﬁrst launched by the National Corporation for
 Antiquities and Museums (NCAM) in 1988, but the ﬁrst concessions were
 awarded only in 1996 to the Gdansk Archaeological Museum Expedition
 (GAME) and three years later to SARS. By 2003, twelve missions were
 awarded concessions and the entire area to be ﬂooded, from the dam
 construction site to the island of Mograt, became the focus of
 archaeological work in Sudan for the rest of the ﬁrst decade of the 21st
 century (Fig. 1). The editor of the volume, Derek Welsby, head of the
 SARS mission at the MDASP, describes the history of the project in the
 ﬁrst chapter of the volume (pp. 1--14).
 Like all salvage projects, MDASP encompassed the study of the widest
 possible span of cultural horizons and had a multidisciplinary
 character. The datasets collected, analyzed, and interpreted were
 immense and the eﬀort undoubtedly formidable. SARS under the direction
 of Derek Welsby, together with NCAM under the coordination of Salaheldin
 Mohamed Ahmed, author of the Preface to the volume, led the MDASP and,
 at least in terms of keeping up with the logistical and research
 challenges, are deﬁnitely worth our admiration.
 The present reviewer has worked with diﬀerent missions in the frame of
 the MDASP (see, for example, Plate 1.9 in p. 11 of the volume, as well
 as Fig. 2) and knows from ﬁrst-hand experience the diﬃculties that the
 missions faced. Looking back to those years, the memories from working
 against the clock counting down the last years of traditional life in
 the natural and cultural landscape of the Fourth Cataract, one feels
 that our work was also counting down the last phase of life in the
 Fourth Cataract at the state it was in when we encountered it arriving
 in the region in the early 2000s. This is particularly true for the Dar
 el Manasir, the territory of the tribe most aﬀected by the dam building.
 Despite calls by the Manasir authorities to stand beside them against
 the plans of the dictatorship leading Sudan all through the MDASP
 period, the leadership of the MDASP not only refused to do so, but
 accused the locals for instrumentalizing the archaeologists as
 weapons/shields in their ﬁght for survival in their ancestral lands.[^2]
 Perhaps the themes of this opening volume ("Landscape, toponyms and oral
 history and the people, their settlements, architecture and land use
 before the Merowe Dam"), focusing on the life that the international
 multidisciplinary expeditions encountered in the Fourth Cataract, can be
 seen as an expression of regret for what was irreversibly lost.
 Nonetheless, thanks to the MDASP not all was lost. Testimony is born by
 publications like the volume under review here. The datasets collected
 concern ﬁelds as diverse as archaeology, architecture, geology,
 anthropology, zoology, botany, ethnography, linguistics, and all sister
 disciplines with a focus primarily on the past (for a complete overview
 of the contents, see the Appendix to this review). Given this breadth of
 research, it is difficult to review the scientific rigor of this suite
 of chapters in depth. It is unwise to claim expertise on all of the
 ﬁelds that a volume, like the one edited by Welsby, covers. There is,
 however, space for discussing the choices in the way that these studies
 are presented. Moreover, half of the pages in the "Archaeology by the
 Fourth Nile Cataract" concern the *homescapes of the Manasir*, one of
 the most sensitive aspects of the loss of the cultural landscape in the
 Fourth Cataract region and a topic that is ﬁtting for presentation and
 reviewing in the present volume of the journal *Dotawo* dedicated to
 "Nubian homescapes."
 But to begin with, the volume's ﬁrst two chapters after Welsby's
 introduction deal with the natural landscape that was lost. In Chapter
 2, Pawel Wolf (director of the Anglo-German expedition working in the
 most downstream stretches of the SARS concession), Baldur Gabriel,
 Robert Bussert, and Ronny Schomacker describe "The landscape of the
 Fourth Nile Cataract and its geomorphologic evolution" (pp. 15--45);
 while Arnaud Malterer provides a summary of the master thesis that he
 wrote in Chapter 3 titled "Merowe Dam Project. Land use and Vegetation
 in the Flooding Area of a planned Hydrodam in Northern Sudan" (pp. 46--
 78). Both chapters are very rich in information and set in place the
 environment upon which humans developed the cultures that were hosted in
 the Fourth Cataract of the Nile region. The scientiﬁc accuracy of the
 descriptions is impressive in both chapters. There is, however, a
 critical point to be made about parts of Chapter 2, namely that the
 terminology is so dense that it becomes diﬃcult to follow the argument.
 Therefore, the importance of Chapter 2 for non-specialists might be
 restricted to its overall descriptions and major conclusions, which are
 nevertheless much more accessible to such readers through the text
 authored by Malterer. This observation does not diminish the value of
 Wolf et al's contribution, but it raises a question as to the target
 readership of such a publication. If this should be decided on the basis
 of Chapter 2, then the record is to be kept for those that in the future
 will need it for further studies on relevant ﬁelds; it acts as metadata
 to an archive. But is it necessary in the 21^st^ century with the
 immensity of digital solutions to choose the vector of a printed book
 for such a task? One must not lose sight that a variety of readers,
 including (primarily?) those English-speaking deracinated locals, long
 for a such a "book" to remember their "paradise lost". Conversely, the
 goal of such publications may simply be to make data available to the
 specialized public, and not to create synthetic, edited overviews of
 topics based on the data accumulated by the researchers and interpreted
 by the given author(s) and editor(s) so as to be interesting for a wider
 -- but knowledgeable -- audience. Perhaps this would be a legitimate
 expectation after the 15 years that it took from the end of the MDASP
 project to the publication of the volume. The present reviewer feels
 that the editor of the volume *did not have the time* to choose the
 second option but wanted this ﬁrst volume "out". The contributors had to
 submit their work within the publication's deadlines; this time pressure
 is felt elsewhere in the volume too, primarily in the many typographic
 mistakes and some unnecessary contradictions. The most striking example
 of the latter is that Volume VI on "The rock art and rock gongs", which
 was announced in p. xxx in the Summary of the volume, is not included in
 the description of the SARS' publication of the project in p. 12.
 Paradoxically, a similar feeling of wanting to publish the material as
 quickly as possible is visible in the presentation of images. No less
 than 598 Tables, Plates and Figures that have been printed in color!
 Kudos to the typesetters, printers and funders, but the density of this
 material has caused the dimensions of the images to shrink and makes it
 impossible to see the details of half of them without a magnifying
 glass. This issue could have been avoided with a more thought-out
 selection (hence the argument above) or by the creation of a larger
 volume. The price diﬀerence between printed and pdf versions is
 substantial (65£ vs 15£[^3]) and those wanting to purchase the printed
 version would at least be compensated by the quality of the printed
 texts and images.
 It remains in any case a desideratum to ﬁnd one day all the datasets
 from the MDASP available online through a central digital repository
 uniting the various local physical archives that the expeditions to the
 Fourth Cataract have created. Such repositories are always of great
 importance for the dissemination of the knowledge acquired, and
 especially now they have become critical for the achievement of this
 goal due to the war that devastates Sudan and its infrastructures.
 Finally, they are also necessary for appreciating the contribution of
 Chapter 5 by M. Jalal Hashim on "Toponymy in the Fourth Cataract" (pp.
 89--126). The author has assembled 308 toponyms from the SARS concession
 area but laments the fact that similar surveys have not been conducted
 in other parts of the ﬂooded region. Even if this statement is not
 entirely correct, (if one looks for example into the work conducted by
 the Humboldt University Nubian Expedition (HUNE),[^4]) it is
 nevertheless true that it will be a tremendous task to retrieve the
 relevant information from the datasets of the various missions. This
 information is undoubtedly registered, but apparently neither
 systematized nor standardized according to the United Nations Group of
 Experts on Geographical Names that Jalal Hashim respects (see p. 89).
 The author also calls for action with what remains from Manasir memory
 through interviews with the resettled population for as long as they
 remember the landscape they were forced to abandon (see p. 91). All of
 this data needs a digital repository that will assemble, preserve and
 disseminate the acquired through the MDASP knowledge. The work by Jalal
 Hashim may serve as a prototype for the studies to be conducted in the
 missions' archives and among the Manasir.
 Of equal value are his eﬀorts to assemble "the oral history of the
 Manasir," the title of his other contribution in the volume, where it is
 placed as chapter 4 (pp. 79--88). Against the grain of etic approaches
 to the past of the Fourth Cataract region, inevitably due to the focus
 on archaeological research conducted by foreign archaeological missions,
 the study by Jalal Hashim has a double advantage: ﬁrst, it gives voice
 to the local population before their resettlement, creating a
 much-wanted emic perspective on the Manasir past; and it accommodates
 the traditional means of history-making among the peoples of the Middle
 Nile region, namely through oral narratives and a discourse based on
 genealogies. An important aspect of this approach is that it also moves
 the women of the region from the backstage of research on the Sudanese
 past and into the forefront of life in the Dar al Manasir, recognizing
 their role as stakeholders of the tribal memory, as well as of
 traditional Islamic values in both village and family life. His
 concluding remarks contain the most acute political statements in the
 entire volume concerning the traumatic experience of resettlement --
 also in comparison to the earlier experience of the Nubians resettled
 due to the ﬂooding of Lower Nubia in the 1960s -- and cautiously
 praising what he calls "the Local Option" Manasir, who decided to follow
 the line of the artiﬁcial lake created behind the Merowe Dam, changing
 their subsistence from farmers and pastoralists to ﬁshermen and traders
 of their catch, while remaining close to their ﬂooded ancestral lands.
 These two studies create an excellent backdrop for the three last
 chapters of the book, which turn the attention to the homes, both as
 architectural creations and landscapes where the everyday life of the
 Manasir evolved.
 Chapter 6 is authored by Rebecca Bradley and Nuha Abdel Haﬁz Abdel Aziz
 (pp. 127--159). Its title "Dar el-Arab Fourth Cataract: 2004
 Ethnographic Studies" describes its geographical focus (the most
 downstream area of the SARS concession and base of the Anglo-German
 expedition lead by Pawel Wolf) and the purpose of ﬁeldwork conducted in
 2004, namely, to collect ethnographic information among the local
 people. These "ethnographic studies" open with "Household studies" where
 they describe the architecture and the partition of activity-areas
 inside the homesteads of three villages. They continue with the
 description of various everyday activities taking place outside the
 homesteads, like ﬁshing, hunting using traps, masonry, pottery,
 metal-working, grass-cutting, and the agricultural practice of *seluka*
 (pp. 127--154). They document folkloristic traditions (pp. 154--156),
 where religious beliefs are also part of the material presented. And
 they record some local histories about the origins of people and
 settlements, as well as a set of customs, particularly linked with
 women's activities (pp. 156--159). These ethnographic studies situate
 the life of the Manasir beyond the architectural shells of the houses,
 oﬀering insights into their lost homescapes and mental geographies. In
 this sense, Chapter 6 would have been better placed after chapters 7 and
 8, which focus on the architectural creations, their relationship with
 the natural environment, and the social communities that they
 accommodate. But the placement of this chapter here is perhaps because
 it constitutes a ﬁne complement to Jalal Hashim's chapters with their
 equally ethnographic focus -- especially if one compares the oral
 histories, the origins of the Manasir, and a certain focus on women's
 role, that both Bradley/Abdel Aziz and Jalal Hashim preserve for
 posterity.
 Chapter 7, authored by the architect Nadejda Reshetnikova, is titled
 "Modern Vernacular Architecture and Settlements Organization at the
 Fourth Nile Cataract between Dar el-Arab and Dar el-Waraaq" (pp.
 160--189). Reshetnikova not only provides excellent architectural plans
 and section drawings of the households she investigates, but also
 presents the engineering methods and tools, discusses the design,
 analyzes the development of the settlements, and contextualizes her
 information against an understanding of socio- economic diﬀerentiation
 among the inhabitants of the villages she visited.
 Finally, chapter 8 by Frances Welsh is about "Architecture and life in
 villages of the Fourth Nile Cataract in the region of al Tiref"
 (pp.190--238). This chapter is a continuation of Reshetnikova's in terms
 of the geography it covers moving upstream from Dar el-Arab, while it
 functions in a complementary manner since Welsh also exhaustively
 presents the diﬀerent types of buildings, their function in the
 settlements, and the way they are placed inside the settlements. Welsh
 is especially interested in the way these buildings are adapted to the
 natural environment and the possibilities or constraints this imposes
 upon the various alternatives available to the locals.
 These three chapters (6, 7, and 8) are priceless records of the Manasir
 homescapes that are lost forever. They preserve for posterity the
 cultural landscape of several villages both on the mainland and on the
 islands through descriptive texts, good drawings, rich photographic
 documentation, and some valuable societal analyses. They are
 complemented by published studies on modern villages of the Manasir
 further upstream, especially those conducted in the framework of the
 HUNE concession.[^5] They can provide comparanda for studies of
 vernacular architecture in other areas of the Middle Nile region, and
 thus insights into the cultural particularities of the Manasir, their
 technical know-hows, their dependence on external impulses, and their
 social organization and stratiﬁcation. And last but not least, they are
 repositories of the local memories of life in the Fourth Cataract,
 either for the Manasir who resettled or those who went for "the Local
 Option."
 The volume would have proﬁted from a more thorough copy-editing process,
 avoiding variations between title and sentence cases or orthographies of
 Arabic words using transliterations of diﬀerent sorts. Perhaps it could
 also have proﬁted from a diﬀerent organization of the chapters moving
 from the context of the natural landscape to the settlement patterns and
 the toponymy, then presenting the various architectural solutions
 adopted by the Manasir, and having thus created the scenery for staging
 the Manasir people's every-day activities, genealogies, memories and
 beliefs. While the ﬁrst volume of the SARS activities in the frame of
 the MDASP leaves the reader with the desire for a better editing hand,
 it constitutes a point of reference for the future of the studies
 deriving from the controversial "Archaeology by the Fourth Nile
 Cataract."
 # Appendix: The contents of the volume
 Preface. Salahedin Mohamed Ahmed
 Chapter 1: Merowe Dam Archaeological Salvage Project. The SARS Amri to
 Kirbekan Survey 1999-2007. Derek A. Welsby
 Chapter 2: The landscape of the Fourth Nile Cataract and its
 geomorphologic evolution. Pawel Wolf, Baldur Gabriel, Robert Bussert,
 and Ronny Schomacker
 Chapter 3: Merowe Dam Project. Land use and Vegetation in the Flooding
 Area of a planned Hydrodam in Northern Sudan. Arnaud Malterer
 Chapter 4: The Oral History of the Manasir. M. Jalal Hashim
 Chapter 5: Toponymy in the Fourth Cataract. M. Jalal Hashim
 Chapter 6: Dar el-Arab Fourth Cataract: 2004 Ethnographic Studies.
 Rebecca Bradley and Nuha Abdel Haﬁz Abdel Aziz
 Chapter 7: Modern Vernacular Architecture and Settlements Organization
 at the Fourth Nile Cataract between Dar el-Arab and Dar el-Waraaq.
 Nadejda Reshetnikova
 Chapter 8: Architecture and life in villages of the Fourth Nile Cataract
 in the region of al Tiref. Frances Welsh
 Chapter 9: Bibliography for Volume I
 # References
 Carruthers, William. *Flooded Pasts. UNESCO, Nubia, and the Recolonization of Archaeology*, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2022.
 Eigner, Dieter. "Kirbekan -- ein Dorf der Manasir am 4. Nilkatarakt."
    *Der Antike Sudan: Mitteilungen der Sudanarchäologischen
    Gesellschaft zu Berlin* 16 (2005): pp. 113--24.
 ———. "Kirbekan -- Ein Dorf der Manasir am 4. Nilkatarakt (Teil II)." *Der Antike
    > Sudan: Mitteilungen der Sudanarchäologischen Gesellschaft zu
    > Berlin* 17 (2006): pp. 71--80.
 ———. "Kirbekân: A Village of the Manasir." In *"Nihna nâs al-bahar -- We are the people of the river": Ethnographic Research in the Fourth Nile Cataract Region,
    > Sudan*, edited by Cornelia Kleinitz and Claudia Näser, pp. 127--160. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2012.
 Haberlah, David. "Cultural Landscape of Dar al-Manasir." In *"Nihna nâs al-bahar -- We are the people of the river": Ethnographic Research in the Fourth Nile Cataract Region,
    Sudan*, edited by Cornelia Kleinitz and Claudia Näser, pp. 49--74. Wiesbaden:
    Harrassowitz, 2012.
 Haberlah David and Jutta von dem Bussche. "Das Dorf Atoyah auf der Insel Sherari. Wandel der Siedlungsstruktur im Dar al-Manasir." *Der Antike Sudan: Mitteilungen der
    > Sudanarchäologischen Gesellschaft zu Berlin* 16 (2005): pp. 125--135.
 Hafsaas-Tsakos, Henriette. "Ethical implications of salvage archaeology and dam building: The clash between archaeologists and local people in Dar al-Manasir, Sudan."
    *Journal of social archaeology* 11(1), 49--76.
 [^1]: The results of the Scandinavian Joint Expedition are the only
    complete; Adams has done tremendous work with Ceramics, Christian
    Architecture, Kulubnarti, Meinarti, Qasr Ibrim, and the West Bank
    Survey; and ﬁnally, there are fourteen volumes published by the
    Oriental Institute Nubian Expedition. For the latest complete
    bibliography about the Aswan High Dam Campaign, see Carruthers,
    *Flooded Pasts*, 2022, pp. 286--310.
 [^2]: See Hafsaas-Tsakos, "Ethical implications of salvage
    archaeology and dam building."
 [^3]: [https://www.archaeopress.com/Archaeopress/Products/9781803274959]{.underline}
    (last accessed November 2023).
 [^4]: See for example, Haberlah, "Cultural Landscape of Dar
    al-Manasir."
 [^5]: Eigner, "Kirbekan -- ein Dorf der Manasir am 4. Nilkatarakt"; idem, "Kirbekan --
    > Ein Dorf der Manasir am 4. Nilkatarakt (Teil II)"; idem, "Kirbekân: A Village of the
    > Manasir"; Haberlah and von dem Bussche, "Das Dorf
    > Atoyah auf der Insel Sherari. Wandel der Siedlungsstruktur im Dar
    > al-Manasir."
--- a/content/issue/dotawo9.md
+++ b/content/issue/dotawo9.md
@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
 ---
 title: "Dotawo 9: Nubian Homescapes from Antiquity to the Present"
 editors: ["annaboozer.md", "annejennings.md"]
-has_articles: ["tsakoswelsby.md"]
+has_articles: []
 keywords: ["homescape", "home", "homeland", "household", "homelife", "diaspora", "displacement", "tahgeer" ,"Nubia", "Nubian", "Aswan High Dam Campaign", "war", "genocide", "resettlement", "Kom Ombo", "stereotype", "longue durée"]
 ---
@ -189,7 +189,7 @@ act in their new settings.
 The contributors to this volume approach homescapes from broad temporal,
 geographic, and disciplinary standpoints. Despite these differences,
 common themes arose among the contributions, such as the value of the
-surrounding landscape in creating homescapes (e.g. Sadeq, Tsakos,
+surrounding landscape in creating homescapes (e.g. Sadeq Tsakos,
 Fulcher, Hamad) and the need to describe and interact with the home
 creatively in the form of words or images (Fulcher, Shatta, Jennings,
 Goo-Grauer). Given the rich connections between them, these papers could
@ -387,7 +387,7 @@ and Ancient Society/World Archaeology* 25, no. 2 (1993): 152-74.
 Janmyr, Maja. \"The Nubians of Egypt: A Displaced Population.\" In *An
 Atlas of Contemporary Egypt*, edited by Hala Bayoumi and Karine Benafla,
-96-7. Paris: CNRS Éditions 2023.
+96-97. Paris: CNRS Éditions 2023.
 Yao, Alice. \"The Great Wall as Destination? Archaeology of Migration
 and Settlers under the Han Empire.\" In *Archaeologies of Empire: Local
@ -397,21 +397,29 @@ Press, 2020.
 Youssef, Maaï, and Mayada Madbouly. \"Displaced People and Migrants in
 Cairo.\" In *An Atlas of Contemporary Egypt*, edited by Hala Bayoumi and
-Karine Benafla, 32-3. Paris: CNRS Editions, 2023.
+Karine Benafla, 32-33. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2023.
 [^1]: For a basic geographic and temporal introduction to Nubia, see
-    Janmyr, \"The Nubians of Egypt: a displaced population,\".
+    Maja Janmyr, \"The Nubians of Egypt: a displaced population,\" in
    *An Atlas of Contemporary Egypt*, ed. Hala Bayoumi and Karine
    Benafla (Paris: CNRS Éditions 2023).
-[^2]: Ingold, \"The Temporality of the Landscape,\".
+[^2]: Tim Ingold, \"The Temporality of the Landscape,\" *Conceptions of
    Time and Ancient Society/World Archaeology* 25, no. 2 (1993).
 [^3]: Alice Yao described this process for the people who were relocated
-    to live along the Great Wall in Han China. See Yao, \"The
+    to live along the Great Wall in Han China. See Alice Yao, \"The
    Great Wall as Destination? Archaeology of Migration and Settlers
-    under the Han Empire,\".
+    under the Han Empire,\" in *Archaeologies of Empire: Local
    Participants and Imperial Trajectories*, ed. Anna Lucille Boozer,
    B.S. Düring, and Bradley J Parker (Albuquerque, NM: SAR & UNM Press,
    2020).
 [^4]: For an overview of the four main waves of Nubian settlement in
-    Cairo from 1902 until 1964, see Youssef and Madbouly,
+    Cairo from 1902 until 1964, see Maaï Youssef and Mayada Madbouly,
-    \"Displaced People and Migrants in Cairo,\".
+    \"Displaced People and Migrants in Cairo,\" in *An Atlas of
    Contemporary Egypt*, ed. Hala Bayoumi and Karine Benafla (Paris:
    CNRS Éditions, 2023).
 [^5]: The High Dam (*as-Sad al-\'Aali*) was completed in 1970. The
    reservoir reached its full capacity six years later.