Dotawo/content/article/tsakoswelsby.md

---
title: "The homescapes of the Manasir. A Book review."
authors: ["alexandrostsakos.md"]
abstract:
keywords: ["Book review", "MDASP", "Fourth Cataract", "Derek Welsby", "Sudan", "Manasir"]
---

**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.**

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unpublished.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 finish 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. 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) 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 21st 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 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 the printed and pdf versions is
substantial (65£ vs 15£[^3]) and those who choose to purchase the printed
version should 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--60. 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--35.

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
    (last accessed November 2024).

[^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."