Chapters › Origins & Kerma · Sudan – Middle Nile
Khartoum Mesolithic (Early Khartoum)
8500 BCE – 5000 BCE Arabic under review
Approximate area of control
Research in progress No sourced map of this era's territory yet, so no area is drawn.
Dating note
Corrected -8000/-4900 -> c.8500–5000 cal BC for Early Khartoum ceramics of central Sudan (Garcea/Jesse et al., African Archaeological Review 2021 review). Northern 'Khartoum Variant' is c.8000–4900 cal BC. Site point = city-level approximation.
Key events
- Wavy-line pottery among the earliest ceramics in Africa
- Fishing/hunting settlements along the Nile near Khartoum
Capitals / sites
Early Khartoum site
Geopolitics
No polities. The only 'external relations' visible are contacts and exchange. Some Mesolithic pottery at Al-Khiday and El Kadada uses granite and alkali-feldspar tempers that are not local, which implies raw material (or finished pots) moving from the Sabaloka complex about 100 km away. Whether Early Khartoum pottery styles came from the Sahara or spread to it is unresolved: Caneva proposed a Saharan link, while Jesse and others reject the Wadi Howar as the link (D'Ercole 2021, sections 'Ceramic Fabrics and Archaeometric Laboratory Analyses' and 'Connecting Macroscopic Data and Laboratory Analyses').
Culture
Named by A.J. Arkell from Khartoum Hospital (1949) as the 'Wavy Line Culture' or 'Early Khartoum', later renamed Khartoum Mesolithic. It made pottery with no evidence of food production. Its ceramics (c. 8500–5000 cal BC) carry incised and impressed wavy-line decoration, made in part with catfish-spine combs, and are found at virtually all early Holocene forager sites in central Sudan. Pottery was almost never a grave good, but burials are known, for example at Jebel Sabaloka and Al-Khiday (D'Ercole 2021).
Economy
Early Holocene people of the middle Nile were sedentary or semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers who depended on wild animals, local seeds and plants, and above all on river and lake resources. Pottery is linked to more settled life and to the need to process and store wild cereals, fish and aquatic food (D'Ercole 2021). Mohammed-Ali & Khabir (2003, quoted there) describe wavy-line sites as based on 'seasonal hunting, fishing, and wild grain-collecting'.
Regional power
Research in progress We have not yet read a source for this section. It will be added once one is checked; nothing is filled in by guesswork.
Open data flags
- regional_power: no actors scored
- Pass 17 text: [WORKING TRANSLATION – needs native Arabic review] for every Arabic field
- Pass 20 text: [WORKING TRANSLATION – needs native Arabic review] for every Arabic field
- CONTESTED – Sahara–Nile direction of contact unresolved (AAR2021)
- geopolitics here = contacts/exchange only; no states