imparted

   It can be generally said that the birth of prehistoric studies in Sudan coincides with the discovery and excavation of Khartoum Hospital, the first Mesolithic occupation that was extensively investigated by A. J. Arkell (1949; see Figure 1) to leave space at the construction of the first hospital of the town. A few years after the excavation of the Khartoum Hospital Arkell approached another key site of the entire Nile valley, the Neolithic occupation of Shaheinab (Arkell 1953), located just north of Khartoum, on the west bank of the Nile.

Arkell’s fieldwork, notes, and observations still retain a great value for prehistorians working in the Nile valley. It was Arkell that first outlined the chronological divide between the Wavy Line (incised, see Figure 2a) and Dotted Wavy Line (see Figure 2b) pottery assemblages, the first as emblematic of the Early Mesolithic, and the second of the Late Mesolithic (Arkell 1953).

Figure 2 Sample of pottery decorations present in the Mesolithic production along the Sudanese Nile valley, including the Wavy Line (incised, a) and Dotted Wavy line (impressed, b) types.Figure 3 Most typical decorations of Shaheinab Neolithic pottery. The zig-zag (wolf-tooth) pattern is common also to Neolithic of Nubian area.

Since then, prehistoric archaeological research in the country has had a long period of intense activity, albeit patchy. In fact, a few years later, with the construction of the Aswan High Dam, research concentrated mainly in the area of the II Cataract. Here, archaeologists had to face the difficulty, among many others, of setting into a chronological framework all the evidence documented from this terra incognita. The occurrence of a pottery strongly resembling that of Khartoum Hospital (Figure 2e, f), or similar sites located in Central Sudan (Arkell 1949, 1953), was probably a founding element. The sites producing this characteristic pottery were then affiliated with a new cultural phase called Khartoum Variant (Shiner 1968a; Nordström 1972). A clear Shaheinab relative was never found, but the Abkan culture, more or less contemporaneous, revealed at least one type of pottery with a similar decorative pattern, a zigzag (or wolf teeth) produced with a rocker technique (see Figure 3c), and a similar fabric (Shiner 1968b; Nordström 1972). However, the Khartoum Variant and the Abkan were both considered Neolithic and definitely of distinct origin. The Abkan was directly related to another cultural phase, the Qadan, a lithic industry dating at the very end of the Late Pleistocene (Shiner 1968b). Other, more or less contemporaneous groups and with similar, if not equal, cultural material are hiding in the Shamarkian and Post-Shamarkian industries identified in the Dibeira West District (Schild et al. 1968), on the west bank of the Nile.