Native traditions and novel discoveries tell
the migration story of the ancestors of the
Navajo and Apache
By KAREN COATES
Tuesday, September 29, 2020
Ancient canyons, dry mesas, and high deserts form the iconic landscape of what is now called the American Southwest. To the Navajo, who call themselves Diné (“the people”), this is sacred land, a place they know as Dinétah. It’s the center of their universe, the place where Diné history began. The story of their emergence is passed from generation to generation through days of oral accounts that describe how their ancestors traveled through four worlds—black, blue, yellow, and white—moving through each at an appropriate time, aided by sacred creatures, usually animals or insects, to arrive at the present world. “I think this is a metaphor for the stages of development of our human consciousness and human spirit,” says Navajo archaeologist Adesbah Foguth. Foguth works as an interpretive ranger at Chaco Culture National Historical Park just to the east of the Navajo reservation in the Four Corners region of New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and Utah. When she gives tours of the park, she shares Native histories and talks about the Navajo connection to this land. “We evolved here, we became distinctly Navajo people here,” she says. Her understanding of Navajo emergence also includes a sense of movement and change. “We were also literally migrating on the landscape, moving from place to place.”
Navajo is part of the largest indigenous language family in North America, known as Dene, which includes more than 50 languages spoken by Native peoples in the Canadian Subarctic, the Pacific Northwest, and the American Southwest, where the Navajo and their distant cousins, the Apache, are among its southernmost speakers. Currently, archaeologists are attempting to trace the epic 1,500-mile-plus journey the ancestors of the Navajo and Apache made across North America’s mountains and plains. This was one of the most consequential population movements in North American history, taking people from the Canadian Subarctic, among the wettest landscapes in North America, to the desert Southwest, its most arid region. At the beginning of the migration, the ancestors of today’s Navajo and Apache were foragers. Centuries later, many of their descendants had become farmers. This massive migration forever changed the cultural landscape of the Southwest.
One effort to comprehend this great migration is the Apachean Origins Project, headed by University of Alberta archaeologist Jack Ives and Brigham Young University archaeologist Joel Janetski. “Apachean” refers to a subgroup of Dene speakers comprising the Apache and Navajo. Ives and Janetski lead a team of researchers using archaeological, linguistic, isotopic, and paleoenvironmental evidence to study the links among distant Dene speakers. They also work closely with Dene elders to understand not just when the migration happened, but how the migrators interacted with people they encountered. “Migration creates an infinite number of scenarios for contact with new people,” Ives says. Those interactions can lead to intermarriage, shared cultural traits, and a coalescence of what previously were two or more distinct peoples.
Ives and Janetski have focused their work on a remarkable site, which, nearly a century ago, provided surprising evidence that a culture accustomed to life more than 1,000 miles north in the Subarctic also lived in the American West. How they got there and what happened along the way are a sometimes misunderstood, uniquely North American migration story.
In 1930, a young University of Utah archaeologist named Julian Steward began excavating in two caves on Promontory Point, a peninsula on the northern edge of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. The caves’ dry environment proved ideal for preserving artifacts, and over two years, Steward found baskets, pottery, fiber ropes and mats, juniper bark, bison bones, arrow points and shafts, bow fragments, knife handles, scrapers, and awls. He also found the remnants of some 250 moccasins that strongly resembled footwear made and worn by Canadian Dene cultures past and present. Each of the carefully stitched intact moccasins, which are now stored at the Natural History Museum of Utah (NHMU), reflects the size and gait of the person who wore it. Some are tiny, made for children. Some have blown-out heels that were later repaired. A few have decorative porcupine quills, and all have small stitches and puckering around the toes. And, 700 years after the Promontory people wore them, these moccasins still smell strongly of smoke—a reminder of the fires used to tan their hides. The moccasins Steward found are unlike those made by the neighboring people who belonged to a farming culture known today as the Fremont. Although the Fremont created elaborate rock art and clay figurines, their moccasins don’t have the distinctive puckered stitching and quillwork of those found in the caves.
The presence of the Dene-style moccasins in Promontory Caves led Steward to suggest a groundbreaking idea for the time: that the site’s early occupants were bison hunters of Apachean ancestral origin who had come to the Great Salt Lake from the Subarctic and Northern Plains. If he were right, Promontory Caves would likely prove to be a pivotal location for the study of North American migrations and the cultural evolution of indigenous tribes. But Steward never returned to the site to gather further evidence to test his hypothesis and his research stalled. Twentieth-century scholars continued to debate the ancestral origins of the Navajo and Apache, but never came to a consensus. Some suggested that Apacheans arrived in the seventeenth century during the Spanish colonial period.
About 20 years ago, Ives and Janetski realized they shared an interest in Promontory Caves and the distinctive moccasins Steward had unearthed there. “Jack and I decided, gosh, it would be nice to go back to those caves,” Janetski says. The two assembled an interdisciplinary team with the goal of precisely dating the artifacts and testing Steward’s theory that the caves had sheltered Apache and Navajo ancestors during their southward migration. And they wanted to better understand the people who had left their shoes on the caves’ floors.
One of their first efforts was to radiocarbon date Steward’s moccasins. They found that the dates centered around A.D. 1250 to 1290. This exceptionally narrow time frame suggests that perhaps just a few generations of Apachean ancestors lived in the cave some 400 years before the Spanish colonial period to which some archaeologists had linked early Apacheans. The thirteenth century was a time of extreme drought in North America. The archaeological record shows that the Fremont in the area around Promontory Caves abandoned farming during this time, and, out of desperation, turned to foraging. But the people living in the caves seem to have thrived as bison hunters. “This was a healthy, vibrant population that was doing really well,” says Ives. When Ives and his team conducted their own excavations at Promontory Caves between 2011 and 2014, they uncovered still more moccasins. By studying the sizes of all the moccasins excavated, they concluded that some 80 percent of them belonged to children or teenagers, suggesting that the mid-thirteenth century population of Promontory Caves was young and rapidly increasing.
Working with Native elders, the team was able to confirm that the style of the moccasins both Steward and they had unearthed was distinctly Dene. One of these elders is Bruce Starlight of the Tsuut’ina Nation, a Dene people who live on the plains of modern-day Alberta. “I never talk about something I don’t know,” says Starlight. He has examined the Promontory Caves moccasins and believes they prove Dene people once lived at the site. “The Dene still have that style of moccasin,” he says. The footwear could even have been used as a form of identification. “A long time ago, when they did battle among each other, the first thing they looked at was your moccasins,” says Starlight. Unlike the simpler Fremont moccasins, those found in Promontory Caves would have required a lot of time and a high degree of skill to make. Ives speculates that the moccasins might not only have been an expression of culture, but of care for the makers’ loved ones. “The moccasins are highly evocative,” says Ives. “We all react to them on a human level; you can sense a person.” Many of them still have distinct indentations of toes, the individual marks of the people who wore them as they walked across the landscape.
In addition to the moccasins, the team unearthed more bison bones, hide scrapers, sewing awls, small beads, and fragments of woven mats and baskets. Perhaps the most significant group of artifacts they excavated is a large collection of gaming pieces. This evidence of gambling is particularly telling, says Canadian Museum of History archaeologist Gabriel Yanicki. “These games weren’t just recreational pastimes,” he says. They were a proxy for communication, indicating that contact between groups was taking place. Native elders have explained that when two groups speaking different languages and from different cultures encountered each other, they had a choice: “They could fight,” Yanicki says, “or they could gamble.”
The gambling items from Promontory Caves include a juniper-bark ball, decorated sticks, badminton-style birdies, hoops, and darts. But the most common artifacts are dice made of cane, which, Yanicki says, were typically used by women. While Native dice games varied across the continent, they usually involved tossing two-sided objects in a basket or bowl or striking them against a hard surface. Gamblers could earn points depending on whether the dice landed face up or face down. Gaming would have led to other social interactions, from meetings and feasts to alliances and intermarriages. “That’s how new societies ultimately form, as groups spend more time together and forge mutual futures,” Yanicki says, adding that this results in the emergence of new social identities.
Recent genetic studies support the idea that marriage between different groups was common during the Apachean ancestral migration. Mitochondrial DNA samples show that modern-day Navajo and Apache have genetic markers from a variety of haplogroups, or genetic groups that share common ancestors. “As Apachean ancestors left the north and progressed farther south, a lot of people entered their society,” explains Ives. Over time, people with primarily northern maternal lineages were joined by people with southern maternal lineages. “It’s right there in the genetic record,” he says. The Promontory Caves people may have recruited women from other societies—as bison hunters, there would have been an abundant need for workers. “Bison meat is somewhat unusual in that it is prone to quick spoilage, so it’s imperative that you immediately get the hide off the animal and allow the carcass to cool,” Ives says. “And it’s women that carry that load.”
None of this surprises Bruce Starlight. “We were great migrators,” he says. “It’s deeply embedded in our stories.” Archaeologists now know that around A.D. 840, a massive volcanic eruption of Mount Churchill in Alaska ejected so-called White River Ash that spread across Canada and as far as Europe. Researchers believe it’s possible the eruption’s impact on the environment and the extreme cold that resulted could have spurred many Dene people to migrate south. Dene oral traditions ranging from Canada to the Southwest include stories that link volcanic eruptions and periods of extreme cold.
If the eruption of Mount Churchill severely disrupted the lives of Dene ancestors, that could help explain why members of the Dene language family are spread across more than 1.5 million square miles. “That’s a huge language family,” says University of Alberta linguist Sally Rice, who works with Ives. She has spent decades compiling a list of 25,000 Dene words including terms for objects, flora and fauna, and things that would have been novelties to populations moving south. For example, northern Dene people have no word for cactus, and Dene speakers in the Southwest refer to cacti using a term that essentially translates as “rose thorn.” Unlike cacti, roses are widely found in the north. “Language itself is a kind of archaeological record,” says Rice. Another example is the overlap in words for “spoon,” “horn,” and “gourd.” In northern Dene cultures, people used horns as spoons or scoops; in the south, people used gourds. The words used to describe these items are all related. At Promontory Caves, Steward unearthed examples of bison-horn spoons.
The Promontory Caves moccasins also display evidence of a southward journey. While Dene footwear was originally designed for cold weather, with fur lining and leather ankle wraps, some of the Promontory Caves moccasins do not include the ankle wrap. “The leggings come off and it becomes a summer moccasin,” says Glenna Nielsen-Grimm of the NHMU. “It’s an adaptation.”
Starlight is one of just a few dozen people who still speak his native Tsuut’ina language, and he is involved in multiple projects to revive the language and bring together Dene peoples from across the diaspora—from Canada, Alaska, and the Pacific Northwest, and south into Mexico. At one of these gatherings, Starlight says, he told a Tsuut’ina story about a dog that stole food from a man’s tepee. Both the dog and the man die in the story. Hearing this, an Apache man from New Mexico stood with tears in his eyes and told Starlight, “I was just a little boy and my grandma used to tell me this story.”
At these meetings, which also include Ives and his team, Dene people have forged connections across the continent. “When I went to that conference, I discovered I had half of Canada related to me!” says Veronica Tiller, a Jicarilla Apache author and historian from New Mexico. “They know things that we don’t know, and we know things that they don’t know. And to think that we’ve been apart for such a long time.”
Tiller is gratified to hear that the Apachean Origins Project has made great efforts to include and accurately portray Native perspectives, something that scholars haven’t always done. She cites the work of early anthropologists who visited her reservation, interviewed elders, and published the first written accounts of Jicarilla history. But the researchers missed the meaning of many of the stories, she says, because they weren’t fluent in the language, didn’t grasp the cultural context, and relied on Native translators who likely had a grade-school-level command of English. “That becomes the body of literature that’s supposed to illustrate who we are as a people,” says Tiller. She and her relatives are now retranslating the texts, which they hope to publish soon.
Like the Navajo, the Apache, too, chronicle their origins in emergence stories based in the Southwest. “It’s like you came out of the womb of the earth,” Tiller says, describing a movement from darkness to light that she likens to a passage from a dark age into a more enlightened era. She thinks of the histories she grew up with, and how they might help shape questions for archaeologists today. “I remember my mother used to tell me that our people used to make an annual migration to Utah to get salt, probably from the Great Salt Lake. And I suspect that we’re not the only population that did that,” she says. Perhaps the lake served as a trading ground for multiple populations, she speculates. Salt is known to have been a prominent trade item among Plains and Apache groups, and objects found in Promontory Caves, such as an abalone shell adornment from the Pacific Coast, indicate that the people living there were involved in thirteenth-century trade networks that extended far and wide.
There is, in fact, growing archaeological evidence for ancestral Apachean groups moving into the greater Southwest as early as the 1300s. Archaeologist Deni Seymour has investigated several sites in southern Arizona and New Mexico that were used to store food, pottery, baskets, and other goods for later use among mobile groups. They were Dene-speaking peoples related to Apache and Navajo groups today. “Promontory Caves was just one of the stopping points along the way,” says Seymour.
When exactly, in the sense of a Western calendar, Apache and Navajo cultural identities emerged, though, remains an open question. “I realize this is a complex and sensitive topic for any community,” says Ives. That’s a compelling reason for archaeologists to consider both the scientific record and indigenous knowledge. For Foguth, who says she went to school for archaeology specifically because she felt that Native peoples were excluded from their own past, this is critical. “The best that professionals in archaeology can do today is to listen,” she says. “Listen and put aside your biases and what you ‘know’ to be true, and remind yourself that what you’ve learned is one story—and that there are other stories that are also true.” When she guides tourists through Chaco Canyon, Foguth ends her historical overview in the present. She talks about living people, where they are today, what they’re doing today, and their current struggles. She tells them that Navajo medicine people say they have entered the sixth world now, evolving into higher levels of humanity. “We didn’t stop migrating,” Foguth says. “We’re still migrating today.”
Karen Coates is a contributing editor at ARCHAEOLOGY.
Excavations at a city on the Nile reveal the origins
of an ancient African power
By MATT STIRN
Monday, August 10, 2020
As the Nile slices through the barren desert of North Africa, it runs straight north, with the exception of one magnificent curve, reminiscent of a giant S. This stretch of the river winds through northern Sudan approximately 250 miles south of the Egyptian border. Known as the Great Bend of the Nile, it marks the southern boundary of Nubia, a region that stretches from Sudan into southern Egypt and has been home to the Nubian people for millennia.
The modern Nubian town of Kerma sits at the northern end of the Great Bend. It is a bustling riverside community teeming with animated produce markets and fishing boats piled high with six-foot Nile carp. At the center of the town rises a five-story mudbrick tower, or deffufa in the Nubian language, which has kept watch there for more than 4,000 years. Consisting of multiple levels, an interior staircase leading to a rooftop platform, and a series of subterranean chambers, the Deffufa once functioned as a temple and the religious center of a Nubian city that was founded there around 2500 B.C. on what was once an island in the middle of the Nile. Also known as Kerma, it was the earliest urban center in Africa outside Egypt.
Below the Deffufa, archaeologist Charles Bonnet of the University of Geneva has spent five decades excavating Kerma and its necropolis. Much of what scholars know of early Nubian history comes from ancient Egyptian sources, and, for a time, some believed Kerma was simply an Egyptian colonial outpost. The pharaoh Thutmose I (r. ca. 1504–1492 B.C.) did indeed invade Nubia, and his successors ruled there for centuries, just as later Nubian kings invaded and held Egypt during the 25th Dynasty (ca. 712–664 B.C.). The ancient history of Egyptians and Nubians is, thus, closely intertwined. But Bonnet’s excavations are offering a markedly Nubian perspective on the earliest days of Kerma and its role as the capital of a far-reaching kingdom that dominated the Nile south of Egypt. His finds there and at a neighboring ancient settlement known as Dukki Gel suggest that this urban center was an ethnic melting pot, with origins tied to a complex web of cultures native to both the Sahara, and, farther south, parts of central Africa. These discoveries have gradually revealed the complex nature of a powerful African kingdom.
Bonnet began working at Kerma in 1976, some 50 years after Egyptologist George Reisner, the first archaeologist to dig at the site, closed his excavations. As the leader of the joint Harvard University–Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition, Reisner had spent many years directing excavations at the Great Pyramid of Giza and working in southern Egypt, where he developed an interest in ancient Nubian culture and in connecting its history to that of the Egyptians. “Reisner thought the place to find new Egyptian art would be in northern Sudan,” says Larry Berman, curator of Egyptology at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In 1913, by request of the Sudanese Antiquity Center in Khartoum, Reisner was directed to Kerma, which, at the time, was only vaguely known to Westerners from the accounts of nineteenth-century European explorers. He was completely unprepared for what was to come. “When Reisner arrived at Kerma, he accidentally discovered a civilization the scope of which was unknown to the Western world,” says Berman.
Slideshow:
New Look at Ancient Nubia
In his early years at the site, Reisner focused on excavating the giant Deffufa and investigating tombs in the city’s necropolis two miles to the east. Dozens of royal tombs he uncovered there date to between 1750 and 1500 B.C., when the city was at its height. These tombs contained hundreds of human and animal sacrifices, jewelry crafted from quartz, amethyst, and gold, and preserved wooden funerary beds inlaid with scenes of African wildlife fashioned of ivory and mica. In one of the tombs Reisner unearthed a large, elegant granite statue depicting Lady Sennuwy, the wife of the prominent Egyptian governor Djefaihapi, who ruled a district north of Luxor sometime between 1971 and 1926 B.C. Nearby, Reisner found a broken bust of Djefaihapi himself.
Most artifacts Reisner excavated were distinct from what he had seen in Egypt, which led him to determine that the inhabitants of the site were from a different culture, which he named Kerma after the surrounding modern town. Reisner also recognized that different African cultures had coexisted in the ancient city. One of these he called the C-Group, a somewhat enigmatic culture that would become key to understanding the site’s origins. Despite recognizing that Kerma was populated by ancient Nubians, Reisner did not believe that the Kerma people had been capable of constructing such a magnificent site, and assumed that they had received help from the Egyptians. The Deffufa, he thought, was most likely the palace of Kerma’s Egyptian governor.
Of the thousands of artifacts that Reisner discovered at Kerma, the sculpture of Lady Sennuwy in particular cemented his Egyptocentric interpretations. “The statue was, at the time, the most beautiful Middle Kingdom statue that any American museum had ever found, and its discovery reinforced Reisner’s ideas that Kerma was ruled and influenced by Egypt,” says Berman. “Scholars at the time were completely unprepared to admit the existence of an indigenous civilization in Nubia that could rival that of Egypt.”
Bonnet’s work at Kerma quickly showed that Reisner was wrong. His team’s surveys of the city’s necropolis revealed 30,000 burials in addition to those Reisner had excavated, making it one of the largest cemeteries yet discovered in the ancient world. And after unearthing tombs, buildings, and pottery that predated the 1500 B.C. Egyptian invasion of Nubia, Bonnet realized that Kerma was not merely an Egyptian colony, but had been built and ruled by Nubians. “The country was wrongly believed to have only depended on Egypt,” says Bonnet. “I wanted to reconstruct a more accurate history of Sudan.” In addition to determining that Nubians had founded the city, the team began to identify evidence of other African cultures at Kerma. They discovered round huts, oval temples, and intricate curved-wall bastions that were distinct from both Egyptian and Nubian architecture, and instead mirrored buildings archaeologists have unearthed in southern Sudan and regions in central Africa. “We realized that the tombs, palaces, and temples stood out from Egyptian remains, and that a different tradition characterized the discoveries,” says Bonnet. “We were in another world.”
Slideshow:
New Look at Ancient Nubia
The Swiss team, now under the direction of University of Neuchatel archaeologist Matthieu Honegger, gradually started to piece together the history of that previously unknown world. They found that beginning around 3100 B.C., driven in part by an increasingly arid climate, people began to settle on the island in the Nile where Kerma would rise. These new arrivals lived in small settlements and used red brushed ceramics of a type that their descendants at Kerma would also use, and placed their huts in a distinctive semicircular pattern.
Fortifications that had been unearthed by Bonnet’s team showed that around 2500 B.C., the people of Kerma constructed a large fortress, and that a dense urban landscape quickly grew up around it. The city’s residents built circular huts, larger communal wooden structures, bakeries, and markets. Large ceramic vessels throughout Kerma seem to have provided public drinking water, likely for both citizens and visitors. A small chapel was constructed where the Deffufa would later stand, and the entrance to the city was marked by a mudbrick-and-wood gate built in a style still evident in Nubian houses today. Royal quarters with an elaborate courtyard were constructed near the city center. Around this time, nobles were first entombed in the necropolis to the east of the site. In several ceramic workshops nearby, artisans created a style of ornate dining ware only found in the nobles’ tombs. Bonnet believes these dishes were used during funeral rituals that involved meals held between mourning families and the recently deceased. The discovery of ceramic Egyptian trade seals, faience artifacts, and ivory and jewelry from southern Sudan, shows that Kerma was growing into an important trade center. Farmers contributed to the economy during this time by raising cattle and planting legumes and grain in irrigated ditches surrounding the city walls. Bonnet’s team uncovered well-preserved evidence of this in traces of wooden plowshares, holes dug in the soil for as-yet-unplanted crops, and the footprints of both people and of oxen teams, along with thousands of domesticated cattle prints pressed into the hardened mud as if they had been made only a few weeks before.
In addition to evidence of ambitious building projects and a growing economy, finds dating to early in the city’s history indicate the arrival of the C-Group identified by Reisner, possibly from Darfur in western Sudan or modern-day South Sudan. Their emergence in Nubia, marked by the sudden appearance of incised black-and-white ceramics and distinctive grave decorations, suggests that they immigrated quickly into the region. Shortly after their arrival, these new people rapidly integrated with the local Nubians and began to assimilate into the city’s culture, while maintaining a number of their own traditions.
Slideshow:
New Look at Ancient Nubia
Some of the best evidence that Nubians and the people of the C-Group coexisted at Kerma has been uncovered by Honegger’s team in the necropolis. They found that graves of Kerma people from this early period were generally small pit burials in which the dead were placed in a fetal position on a mat made from either leather or woven plants. Small rows of cattle skulls were often placed in an arc outside the grave, and additional objects such as ceramic vessels, jewelry, and sacrificed animals were arranged around the body. Most men were buried with an ostrich-plume bow, and most women had a wooden staff in their graves.
Honegger’s team has also discovered that during the necropolis’ earliest phases, graves from the C-Group culture were surrounded by multiple stelas, and those of the Kerma culture were covered in a decorative pattern of black and white stones. Honegger was surprised that the style of ceramics found in the graves did not always correspond to the culture suggested by the decorations on the outside. In several instances, Honegger observed that Kerma pottery was found in graves marked by C-Group stelas, and C-Group pottery was excavated from graves marked by Kerma pebbles. For him, the mixture of funerary styles indicates that the two groups not only coexisted, but probably intermarried, and that upon their death, a person could be buried in a way that honored both traditions. Although evidence shows that the C-Group suddenly disappeared from Kerma around 2300 B.C. and moved north toward Egypt, their brief presence helped establish a multicultural foundation that would endure throughout Kerma’s history.
Some buildings Bonnet has unearthed at Kerma suggest that African influences from outside Nubia endured, and that foreign people continued to live at Kerma even after the C-Group departed. To him, the building styles there represent a conglomeration of cultures, with architecture not only influenced by Egyptian practices, but also inspired by other African traditions. In particular, a courtyard in the southern part of the city surrounded by circular structures and a small fort featuring curved defensive walls allude to African traditions that resemble modern architecture in Darfur, Ethiopia, and South Sudan. Much like the C-Group, however, the precise identity of these later African populations at Kerma remains unknown. Little archaeological research has been conducted in southern Sudan, and there are very few known sites with which to compare Kerma.
Slideshow:
New Look at Ancient Nubia
Kerma continued to thrive after the departure of the C-Group people. Bonnet and Honegger’s excavations in the necropolis show that around 2000 B.C., Kerma’s kings initiated construction of elaborate royal tombs surrounded by thousands of cattle skulls. This signaled the beginning of a new phase in the city’s history as it grew in size and its rulers began to exert their influence across northeast Africa. Bonnet’s analysis of the multiple building stages of the Deffufa shows that it was enlarged from a chapel into a multistory temple and became the city’s religious center. Cults devoted to the sun likely worshipped atop the Deffufa and those dedicated to the underworld practiced rituals in a nearby windowless chapel. Excavations throughout the city show that the number of bakeries, workshops, religious structures, courtyards, and houses increased dramatically at this time. Bonnet also discovered that there was a significant increase in the number of wealthy houses, and that the royal quarters were expanded. The construction of increasingly robust fortifications suggests there were frequent military clashes with Egypt as both powers competed for control of the Nile Valley.
Now firmly established in a fortified capital, around 1750 B.C., the kings of Kerma ordered an even more massive palace to be built. Their royal tombs also became even more lavish. At the southern end of the necropolis, Bonnet and Honegger have unearthed very large tombs, some measuring 200 feet in diameter and each containing more than 100 human sacrifices. An abundance of Egyptian artifacts and the discovery of ceramic trade seals bearing the names of Egyptian pharaohs in Kerma’s necropolis suggest that, despite their military clashes, the two powers maintained close economic connections during this time. According to contemporaneous Egyptian inscriptions, however, this relationship deteriorated for good after a failed invasion of Egypt by Kerma in 1550 B.C. Following that campaign, the Egyptians responded with a series of invasions under Thutmose I around 1500 B.C., and Thutmose II (r. ca. 1492–1479 B.C.) some 20 years later. These resulted in brief Egyptian occupations of Nubia that were subsequently rebuffed by revolts and counterattacks. In 1450 B.C., Thutmose III (r. ca. 1479–1425 B.C.) launched a final campaign into Nubia. He successfully conquered Kerma and established a firm rule over the region. Scholars had long assumed that after the Egyptians conquered Kerma they moved the capital half a mile north to the site of Dukki Gel, where Bonnet and his team have excavated in recent years. The obvious presence of Egyptian buildings at Dukki Gel from the time of Thutmose I and later had always suggested that the city was founded by Egyptians, and that it functioned as a colonial center in much the same way Reisner once assumed Kerma had.
But when Bonnet and his team began digging at the site, they unearthed fresh evidence of African architecture postdating the Egyptian invasion, a find that suggests African traditions continued at Dukki Gel perhaps after Kerma was abandoned. Even more surprising, once the team dug below the Egyptian settlement at Dukki Gel, they uncovered circular African buildings dating to before the Egyptian conquest. These buildings were defended by walls that have no known prototypes in the Nile Valley. Even though ancient cities were rarely built as close together as Kerma and Dukki Gel, for Bonnet the conclusion was inescapable—this was an urban center that dated to the same time that Kerma was at its height.
Bonnet wondered how an entire city built using non-Nubian African traditions and presumably serving a different population could have existed so close to Kerma. He notes that Egyptian sources say that their armies often contended not just with Nubians, but with coalitions of enemies to the south. Perhaps, he suggests, the kings of Kerma occasionally led a kind of federation of Nubians and Africans from farther south against Egypt. Leaders from the south may have brought their armies to Dukki Gel, which they built according to their traditions, and which might have functioned as a ceremonial and military center. Geomagnetic surveys at the site have yielded images of installations that might have been troop encampments, but these have yet to be excavated.
Slideshow:
New Look at Ancient Nubia
Kerma was only the first capital of what would become the Kingdom of Kush, a Nubian power that reigned across northeast Africa for another 1,300 years. The Kushite kings ruled from the cities of Napata and Meroe farther south. In 2003, while excavating a New Kingdom temple complex near Dukki Gel, Bonnet’s team uncovered a cache of granite statues nearby depicting prominent Kushite kings, such as the great pharaoh Taharqa, (r. ca. 690–664 B.C.) who ruled over Egypt, and one of his successors, King Anlamani (r. ca. 623–593 B.C.). Even though the cache postdates the abandonment of Kerma by 800 years, it is clear evidence that Kushite kings continued to honor the area as the royal site where their ancestors had laid the groundwork for the rise of the Nubian Kingdom.
In fact, some cultural traditions established at Kerma endured throughout the history of Kush—and much longer. Modern Nubians in Sudan still bury their dead on wooden funeral beds in the same style found in Kerma’s necropolis, and graves in the region are still marked with decorative patterns of black and white stones. Public drinking water for thirsty travelers and workers is also provided in large ceramic vessels throughout Nubia, just as it was in ancient Kerma. Archaeologist Salaheldin Ahmed, coordinator of the Qatar-Sudan Archaeological Project, points out that for modern Sudanese, Kerma continues to provide a touchstone. “Kerma culture,” he says, “represents the real roots of Sudanese identity.”
Matt Stirn is a journalist and photographer based in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and Brookline, Massachusetts. To see more images of Kerma and Dukki Gel, click here.