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People without a history*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

O. G. S. Crawford
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Extract

Many years ago I was put in charge of the excavation of an ancient mound-site at Abu Geili on the Blue Nile near Sennar. Careful records were kept, but for reasons wholly outside my control it is only recently that I have been enabled to write a full account for publication. In the course of doing so I have constantly been brought up against first principles; in the present article I propose to consider how these principles apply, as I see it, to Sudanese archaeology at the present time.

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Article
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Antiquity , Volume 22 , Issue 85 , March 1948, pp. 8 - 12
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1948

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References

* As stated in the text, this article is a by-product of work done for another publication. At first I intended to submit for publication elsewhere; but finally decided to publish it here, as it touches on matters of method which are of general interest.

1 Excavations in Cranborne Chase, vol. IV, 1898, 27.

2 The distinction between archaeology and history is of course largely artificialand based upon a difference in method. Both deal with a single evolutionary process, which for lack of any other covering word must be called ‘history’. The history—in the narrower sense—of the Sudan south of Soba does not begin until the 16th century; and the history of the White Nile and regions to the south not until the 19th. Darfur is outside the scope of the present article.

* Of course I do not for one moment suggest that the excavation of Sutton Hoo came under the category of mere looting! It was carried out in exemplary fashion.

3 SNR. VI, III.

4 But as no anthropologist has yet published any adequate description of the modern pottery of the Dinka (or of the Shilluk) this description does not help much.

5 Roughly about 6 acres or a little less.

6 SNR. 1 (4), 239.

7 Travels in Africa, by W. G. Browne, 1799,452.

8 Journ. R. Geogr. Soc. II, 1832: J. Mazuel, and Œuvre Géographique de Linaut de Bellegonds, 1937, 87.