End-of-the-season: Final thoughts

This was a challenging and interesting season at El Kurru. We worked long hours, and our work was often physically demanding. We made progress toward our goals of understanding the ancient settlement, but our current results are not yet fully satisfying. We worked on monumental structures that we will hope to finish excavating in the next season, and that we will hope to be able to understand more fully in terms of their date and their function.

We are extremely grateful to our hosts in Sudan. First, to the antiquities department (which is called the National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums, or NCAM) and particularly to the Director-General Dr. Abdelrahman Ali; the Director of Excavations, El-Hassan Ahmed Mohammed; our inspector Murtada Bushara, who is also the Director of Antiquities for the Northern State in Sudan; and the Sudanese Project Coordinator of the Qatar-Sudan Archaeological Project, Dr. Salaheldin Mohammed Ahmed. One of the great things about doing archaeology in Sudan is having such great colleagues to work with.

Murtada at work at El Kurru

We are also grateful to everyone in El Kurru village who made our stay so enjoyable. I worked particularly closely with two men—our foreman Mansour Mohammed Ahmed, who is also one of NCAM’s guards at the site, and Es-Sadeq Mohammed Saleh, another of NCAM’s guards who was also our very helpful and generous landlord.

Mansour

It was a pleasure to work with James Barrat and the rest of the National Geographic film crew, and we’re looking forward to seeing what they will do with all the footage and conversations we had on site.

Finally, I am happy to thank my excavation team and colleagues, both in the Sudanese team of Prof. Abbas and Prof. Jamal, and in the Copenhagen-based team of Prof. Rachael Dann. I am already looking forward to next season!

Some of the team...in the Nile on a hot day

Thanks to you all for reading along. I'll hope to do this again next year.