Cova 338 redefines Pyrenean prehistory

 Above 2,000 meters: Cova 338 redefines Pyrenean prehistory

• The site, located in the Núria Valley, documents recurrent human occupations spanning more than 5,000 years and provides some of the earliest evidence of copper-rich mineral exploitation in Western Europe
   
• The study, led by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and IPHES-CERCA and published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, challenges the traditional view of high mountain areas as marginal

An international research team led by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) and the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social (IPHES-CERCA) has documented the highest-altitude prehistoric cave with evidence of intense human occupation known to date in the Pyrenees. The site, known as Cova 338, is located at 2,235 meters above sea level in the Núria Valley (Queralbs, Ripollès - Girona) and currently represents the most significant high-mountain prehistoric site documented in the range.

The results show that the cave was repeatedly occupied between the 5th millennium BCE and the end of the 1st millennium BCE, providing new evidence on the exploitation of high-mountain resources in prehistoric times and challenging the traditional idea that these areas were used only sporadically or marginally. Dating indicates that these occupations occurred in several distinct phases, separated by periods of abandonment, suggesting a planned and recurrent use of this space.

This is the main conclusion of the article published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, led by Carlos Tornero, professor in the Department of Prehistory at the UAB and researcher at IPHES-CERCA, with the participation of researchers from IPHES-CERCA, the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, the University of Granada, the Pompeu Fabra University, and the University of the Balearic Islands, among other institutions.

Intense and organized occupation in a high-mountain environment

For decades, archaeological research has interpreted areas above 2,000 meters in altitude as marginal territories, occupied only occasionally. Cova 338 breaks with this model.

Extensive excavations carried out between 2021 and 2023 have revealed “an exceptional archaeological sequence, including numerous combustion structures, faunal remains, ceramic fragments, and a remarkable assemblage of green minerals, likely malachite, a copper-rich mineral”, explains Carlos Tornero. “For the first time in the Pyrenees, high-mountain prehistoric occupations of significant intensity have been documented, characterized by repeated activities and the direct exploitation of mineral resources within the cave.”

Among the recovered materials are also two pendants: one made from a marine shell (Glycimeris) and another from a brown bear tooth, evidencing personal ornamentation practices. The former has parallels in other Catalan sites, while the latter is much rarer and possibly linked to a specific symbolic meaning.

“Cova 338 forces us to rethink the role of high mountain environments in Pyrenean prehistoric societies”, highlights Carlos Tornero. “For a long time, these spaces were assumed to be marginal. What we document here is recurrent occupation, with complex activities and a clear exploitation of mineral resources.”

The evidence suggests that mineral fragments were brought into the cave and subsequently fragmented or processed inside, indicating systematic exploitation of copper-rich minerals in a high-mountain environment throughout the Late Neolithic and the Bronze Age. These data place Cova 338 among the earliest known examples of this type of activity in Western Europe.

Spatial analysis of the site shows a clear internal organization of activities, with differentiated structures and areas. Researchers interpret the cave as a logistical site integrated within well-structured seasonal mobility systems, where human groups returned recurrently to carry out specific tasks.

“The mountain was not a barrier, but an active place within the economic and territorial organization of prehistoric communities”, notes Eudald Carbonell, researcher at IPHES-CERCA and co-author of the study.

A research project under extreme conditions

The research is part of the ARRELS project, a program promoted by the Ministry for Culture of the Government of Catalonia and led by the UAB and IPHES-CERCA, focused on studying the prehistoric roots of human mobility and occupation in the Upper Ripollès region.

Excavations at Cova 338 have posed a major logistical challenge, as access to the cave is only possible on foot from the Núria Valley, with no motorized support allowed. This has required all materials and sediments generated during the digs to be transported manually.

“Conducting an archaeological excavation to current scientific standards under these conditions is extraordinarily demanding”, explains Tornero. The work incorporated high-resolution methodologies, including 3D recording of all materials, systematic sediment sampling, and techniques such as washing and flotation, which allow even the smallest remains to be recovered and provide highly detailed information on the activities carried out in the cave.

Given its scientific importance and excellent state of preservation, the site has been protected and access restricted to ensure the conservation of the deposits and facilitate future research.

The work has also been made possible thanks to the logistical and institutional support of the Queralbs Town Council and the Ter and Freser Headwaters Natural Park, which have facilitated fieldwork in this high-mountain environment.

A key reference for European prehistory

Researchers consider Cova 338 to be a key reference for understanding human occupation of the Pyrenean high mountains and the exploitation of their resources during recent prehistory.

“This site demonstrates that the Pyrenees were not a marginal territory for prehistoric communities, but a space fully integrated into their mobility strategies and territorial exploitation”, concludes Carlos Tornero.

The results open new lines of research into the role of alpine environments in prehistoric societies and the earliest forms of mineral resource exploitation in high-mountain contexts.

Potatoes may have shaped genetic makeup of Indigenous Andeans

 

Study finds that natural selection favored those with high number of starch-digesting genes following the domestication of potatoes in the Andes

 The Indigenous people of the Andes were the first to domesticate the potato, making the starch-rich crop a dietary staple for this high-altitude population long before it spread to the rest of the world.

Today, their descendants in Peru carry the highest known numbers of genes involved in starch digestion of any population in the world.

This is no accident, according to a new study co-led by the University at Buffalo and UCLA and published today (May 5) in Nature Communications. 

Evolutionary biologists and anthropologists found that natural selection favored Indigenous Andeans who had an unusually high number of salivary amylase genes (AMY1) starting around 6,000 to 10,000 years ago — the same period when potatoes were first grown in the Andean highlands, 

People with a high number of AMY1 copies tend to produce more of the amylase enzyme in their saliva, which begins breaking down starch in the mouth, and, thus, are thought to digest starch more effectively.

“Biologists have long suspected that different groups of humans have evolved genetic adaptations in response to their diets, but there are very few cases where the evidence is this strong,” says the study’s co-corresponding author, Omer Gokcumen, PhD, professor of biological sciences in the UB College of Arts and Sciences.

The study collected DNA from Peruvian Andean Quechua speakers — data that was then compared with genomic databases containing thousands of DNA samples from dozens of modern human populations. 

It could open the door to wider research into the lives of people who live at high altitudes — populations that deal with limited foodstuffs and extreme exposure to cold temperatures and ultraviolet rays.

“The high altitude Andes region is known for being a very rich geographic region for understanding human evolutionary adaptation to hypoxia, where tissues do not get enough oxygen,” says co-corresponding author Abigail Bigham, PhD, associate professor of anthropology at UCLA, who studies populations in the Peruvian Andes and the Himalayas of Nepal. “But I think this research highlights how the Andes are very useful for understanding human evolutionary adaptation to other environmental selective pressures like diet adaptation.”

Evolution a sculptor, not a builder

The work builds on Gokcumen’s prior research showing that the initial duplication of AMY1 in humans occurred at least 800,000 years ago, as well as Bigham’s prior research showing evidence of selection in the starch digestion pathway among Peruvian Andeans that corresponds to the period of potato domestication.  

Ancestors of Indigenous Andeans likely already carried both the lower and higher copy numbers of AMY1 before they settled into the highlands and domesticated potatoes. However, when they did begin growing potatoes, those with higher copy numbers gained an evolutionary advantage. 

Starting after about 10,000 years ago, those with roughly 10 copies or more had a 1.24% survival or reproductive advantage per generation.

“Evolution is chiseling a sculpture, not constructing a building,” Gokcumen says. “It’s not as if Indigenous Andeans gained additional AMY1 copies once they started eating potatoes. Instead, those with lower copy numbers were eliminated from the population over time, perhaps because they had less number of offspring, and the ones with the higher copy numbers remained.” 

The result? Indigenous people living in Peru today carry an average of 10 AMY1 copies, approximately two to four more than any of 83 populations examined in the study. 

Did contact with Europeans play a role?

On average, Indigenous people in Peru carry more copies (10 vs. six) than the Maya — an Indigenous population in Mexico with shared evolutionary history but without a tradition of potato farming.

“This direct comparison is one of the major reasons why we think their high number of AMY1 copies in the Peruvians did not evolve just by chance but instead linked to their long history of eating potatoes,” says Luane Landau, a PhD student in Gokcumen’s lab and the joint first author of the study.

However, they still had to account for the dramatic decline in the Indigenous population of the Americas following contact with Europeans in the 15th century, which resulted in disease, famine, violence, conflict and a rapid loss of genetic diversity in a short period of time.

Was it possible that this population bottleneck — rather than natural selection — could have disproportionately removed individuals with lower AMY1 copy numbers? Disentangling the two factors was a major challenge.

In the end, state-of-the-art ultra-long DNA sequencing technologies, along with newly available comparative datasets, allowed the researchers to demonstrate that high numbers of copies of the gene rose in frequency in the Andes several thousand years before Europeans appeared on the scene.

“We saw that the signal of natural selection was also much older, leading us to distinguish it from the population bottleneck,” says the study’s other first author, Kendra Scheer, a PhD student in Gokcumen’s lab. 

The ultra-long DNA sequencing technologies also provided unprecedented resolution that made it possible to investigate the mutational mechanisms responsible for exceptionally high AMY1 copy numbers.

What does it mean now that we all eat french fries?

Better understanding our genome could inform our dietary choices. In the future, people with fewer AMY1 copies could avoid eating too many potatoes or prepare them in a different way. 

“There could come a day when our diets are personalized according to our DNA,” Gokcumen says.

It also raises questions about how humans will evolve from modern diets.

“For most of human history, people ate the same thing their ancestors had eaten for thousands of years. You quite literally needed to migrate across the world to change your diet. So what does it mean now that we eat food from all over the world?” Scheer says. “And now that we’ve demonstrated the natural selection forces at play from eating potatoes, what does it mean now that the whole world eats french fries?”

While some think humans are adapted to the Paleolithic environment and not suited to eat foods that came post domestication, Bigham says their research shows that human populations have responded and evolved to changing food conditions within the last 10,000 years.

“Our metabolic pathways are not simply a product of that Paleolithic past,” she says. 

Other collaborators on the research include the University of Kansas, Penn State University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Puerto Rico at Cayey, Syracuse University, Cayetano Heredia University (Peru) and Bilkent University (Turkey).

The work was supported by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and the Leakey Foundation.
 

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Journal

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-026-71450-8 

Burned stone, child’s bones, and lost jewelry could reveal prehistoric mining camp high in the Pyrenees

 

Archaeologists uncover possible evidence of ancient copper smelting spanning more than 2,000 years in a mountain cave more than 2,000 meters above sea level

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Frontiers

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image: 

Malachite fragments, a mineral rich in copper, recovered during the excavation works at Cova 338. Authorship: Maria D. Guillén / IPHES-CERCA.

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Credit: Maria D. Guillén / IPHES-CERCA.

High in the eastern Pyrenees, archaeologists are revealing the secrets of a prehistoric cave full of hearths containing fragments of green rock that could represent early copper mining. People visited this site for well-planned, well-supplied trips spanning two thousand years, overturning previous assumptions that prehistoric peoples didn’t spend long periods at high altitude. The discovery of a child’s finger bone and baby tooth suggest that, after more excavations, we may find that it was also a burial site.   

“For a long time, high-mountain environments were seen as marginal, places prehistoric communities passed through occasionally,” said Prof Carlos Tornero of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution, lead author of the article in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology. “But we found a really rich archaeological sequence, including multiple combustion structures and a very large number of green mineral fragments. We can’t say exactly how long people stayed each time, but the repeated use of the space and the density of remains suggest occupations that were short to medium in duration, but happening again and again over long periods of time.” 

Burning questions 

Cave 338 is found at 2,235m above sea level in the Freser Valley. The scientists excavated an area of 6m2 at its entrance, identifying four layers of occupation. The first, most recent layer was thin, showing the cave was not frequently used at that time, and contained some artefacts from historical periods. The fourth, oldest layer contains only charcoal fragments, dated at 6,000 years old. 

The researchers hit the jackpot in the second and third layers of the excavation: a total of 23 hearths, containing many crushed, burned green mineral fragments. In-depth material analysis to confirm its identity is underway, but the fragments resemble malachite, which can be treated like this to produce copper. Cave 338 looks like an unexpectedly early high-altitude mining camp. 

“Many of these fragments are thermally altered, while other materials in the cave are not, which clearly suggests that fire played an important role in their processing and that there was a deliberate intention behind it,” said Dr Julia Montes-Landa of the University of Granada, co-author. “In other words, they weren’t burned by accident.” 

The hearths cut across each other, indicating that the visitors reused this space frequently, but are still distinct, which suggests that those visits were separated by plenty of time. Radiocarbon dating puts the hearth found in the second layer at about 3,000 years old, while the hearths in the third layer are around 5,500 to 4,000 years old.  

Secrets of the mountains 

The team also found human remains in the third layer — a finger bone and a baby tooth belonging to at least one child, about 11 years old — which could mean there are burials deeper within the cave. However, there isn’t enough evidence to suggest a cause of death or determine if the two bones belonged to the same child. Jewelry found in the second layer offered more information. 

“We recovered two pendants: one made from a shell and another from a brown bear tooth,” said Tornero. “They come from prehistoric contexts, most likely around the second millennium BC. The shell pendant is interesting because it has parallels in other sites in Catalonia, which suggests shared traditions or connections between different communities. The bear tooth pendant is much less common. That might point to something more specific or symbolic, possibly linked to the local environment.” 

Cave 338 wasn’t a full-time home, but the people who came here found their trips valuable enough to keep returning for millennia. The researchers still have a lot of questions about those trips which they hope to answer with future research. For example, further excavation will help us understand more about how and when humans used the cave. They also want to confirm the exact identity of the green mineral and find out where it came from. 

“The identification of the green mineral as malachite is still preliminary,” explained Tornero. “The research ongoing by the University of Granada and the Autonomous University of Barcelona will provide final answers shortly. Also, the excavation hasn’t yet reached the full depth of the site, so the sequence is not completely documented. This summer we will continue the archaeological work.” 

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Journal

Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology

DOI

10.3389/fearc.2026.1811493 

Sprawling ancient Maya settlement discovered in Quintana Roo

 

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INAH officials were alerted to the site of the Classic Maya city by locals during the construction of the Maya Train line. (INAH)

Mexican archaeologists have registered a sprawling ancient Maya city in southern Quintana Roo after local residents flagged the site during work on the Maya Train project.

According to the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), the settlement includes around 80 structures and Petén‑style architecture spread across at least 100 hectares in Othón P. Blanco, a municipality including coastal and jungle areas south of the Bacalar Lagoon. INAH publicly announced the registration of the site on Monday.El Jefeciño

Specialists say the city — named El Jefeciño (meaning roughly “the Little Boss”) for the monumental scale of its ruins — likely dates to the Early and Late Classic periods, between A.D. 250 and 900, when Petén-style Maya architecture flourished in the region.Petén is a lowland jungle region centered in northern Guatemala, part of a wider basin that extends into Mexico and Belize; it’s home to major Maya cities such as Tikal and Calakmul.

In archaeology, “Petén style” refers to a Classic Maya architectural tradition from the region.

In the case of El Jefeciño, the new city  — discovered via a resident report submitted during 2023-24 work on the Maya Train — is marked by large vaulted buildings, rounded and recessed corners and apron moldings.

Culture Minister Claudia Curiel de Icaza noted that the finding is a good example of how INAH’s work “recognizes the value of the communities in safeguarding a historical memory that belongs to everyone.”

Several archaeologists led the registration work as part of the Tren Maya Archaeological Salvage Project on Section 7. Their survey suggests the city may extend beyond the 100 hectares already mapped.

At the site’s core, they documented an area of five large structures forming a C-shaped plaza. The buildings are between 11 and 14 meters high (36 to 46 feet) and 16 to 40 meters long (52 to 131 feet).

In one building, they recorded stucco fragments with murals painted in white and orange with red stripes, along with pieces of a human skeleton that may belong to a burial context.

Since no excavation has begun, the evidence remains in place. It includes three well-preserved Maya vaults — stone-roof structures inside temples, palaces or other buildings.

INAH plans future airborne LiDAR mapping to refine the city’s layout and guide conservation, consolidation and further exploration.

A pre-Columbian settlement with a similar number of structures was located in the same municipality, Othón P. Blanco, about six or seven years ago, near the coastal village of Mahahual. However, while El Jefeciño includes large, monumental buildings, Mahahual is mainly domestic structures such as homes and walls.

Experts say both settlements could help clarify how ancient Maya communities in southern Quintana Roo were linked through political, social and trade networks.

Trade and the End of Antiquity

 

What was the role of trade, and how did economic activity evolve at the End of Antiquity, when political power shifts away from the Mediterranean towards northern Europe and the Middle East? To answer those questions, we assemble a database of hundreds of thousands of ancient coins from the fourth to the tenth century, estimate a dynamic model of trade and money where coins gradually diffuse along trade routes, and recover granular regional trade and real consumption time series. Our estimates suggest that: Mediterranean trade was disrupted by the newly formed border between Islam and Christianity; economic activity shifts away from the Mediterranean starting in the fifth century; real consumption peaks in the Middle East in the eighth century; and by the end of the ninth century, Atlantic regions from Islamic Spain to Frankish northwestern Europe have become the wealthiest regions of the ancient western world.

After Rome: insights on the formation of Central European societies

 

An international research team led by JGU has analysed genomes from the period around the end of the Western Roman Empire. The study provides new insights into a time of profound change in Central Europe and has been published in the journal Nature.

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Johannes Gutenberg Universitaet Mainz

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A woman's skull, approximately 1,400 years old, discovered during the excavation of her grave in what is now Ergoldsbach. Using a tiny bone fragment from the skull, palaeogeneticists at JGU reconstructed the deceased's complete genome.

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Credit: photo/©: Richter/Kreisarchäologie Landshut

Many of today's villages and towns in Central Europe trace their origins to settlements that emerged after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, often on former Roman territory or in the immediate vicinity of the Limes, the former imperial frontier. Since the nineteenth century this period was often associated with the idea of large migrating groups of Germanic peoples. However, historical research has long since moved away from the concept of a unified Germanic identity and large-scale migration events. An international research team led by anthropologist and population geneticist Professor Dr. Joachim Burger from the Institute of Organismic and Molecular Evolution at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has now analysed genomes of individuals from the former Roman frontier zone between 400 and 700 AD in southern Germany. Their results provide unexpectedly detailed insights into a period of major transformation. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.

The interdisciplinary study involved around sixty researchers from a range of European institutions, including JGU, the University of Tübingen, the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, the University of Freiburg in Germany, the Bavarian State Collections of Natural History, and several other institutions. The researchers come from fields such as population genetics, bioinformatics, anthropology, history and archaeology. The study focused on genomes from skeletal remains found in so called row grave cemeteries, burial sites that became widespread from the mid fifth century across northern Gaul, western and southern Germany, and as far as Hungary.

Two population groups in the Roman frontier region

In total the team analysed 258 genomes from present day Bavaria and Hesse and compared them with a reference dataset of around 2,900 ancient, early medieval and modern genomes from northern and southern Germany. The results show that even in the late Roman period, before the collapse of Roman rule, individuals were buried in cemeteries in what is now southern Germany whose genetic ancestry originated in northern Europe, for example at sites such as Altheim near Landshut and Büttelborn near Darmstadt. This is a surprising finding. At first glance it appears to confirm the established idea of a large-scale Germanic migration, but further analyses lead to a different interpretation.

According to Dr. Jens Blöcher, population geneticist at JGU and one of the two first authors of the study, people from northern regions had already moved south in small groups long before the end of the Western Roman Empire and had gradually adopted Roman ways of life. Many of them appear to have lived separately from the rest of the population, likely as agricultural workers, and tended to marry within their own groups, thereby maintaining the genetic signatures of their ancestry.

The other first author, Dr. Leonardo Vallini, also a population geneticist at JGU, adds that Roman administrative practices may have contributed to this separation. Land was often allocated to incoming groups under specific conditions, including restrictions on marriage, in order to manage integration and maintain control.

For the first time the research team also genetically characterised the population of a Roman military settlement. This population was highly diverse genetically, reflecting centuries of movement and exchange across Europe and even from Asia.

After the end of the Western Roman Empire the two population groups merged rapidly

Joachim Burger, senior author of the study, describes the period after around 470 AD as a turning point. With the collapse of Roman state structures insecurity increased and with it population mobility. People who had previously lived in cities or military settlements moved into rural areas, where they encountered groups with northern European ancestry. These groups formed new communities and began to bury their dead together in shared row grave cemeteries. Burger notes that there is continuity of population components from late antiquity, but also a clear process of merging between previously separated groups.

The old image of a large-scale Germanic migration is no longer supported

The new findings suggest a pattern of regional mobility and gradual integration. According to Professor Dr. Steffen Patzold, medieval historian at the University of Tübingen, the results – based on entirely new scientific data – confirm that the traditional view of large, coordinated migrations of Germanic peoples is inaccurate. Instead, the genomic data point to movements of smaller groups, families, or even individuals. Patzold emphasizes that the evidence indicates these movements were not mass migrations, but rather the result of smaller-scale relocations. The study was initiated jointly by Patzold together with his Tübingen colleagues, Professor Dr. Mischa Meier and Professor Dr. Sebastian Schmidt-Hofner.

The origins of European family structures

From the genomic data the researchers were able to reconstruct family relationships and show how new family structures emerged during this period of demographic change. According to Joachim Burger, the rapid formation of families across the two groups suggests a shared cultural framework, which he identifies as the late Roman cultural sphere. Long before the political end of the Roman Empire, both groups were already culturally connected through life within the imperial system.

The reconstructed family trees also provide detailed insights into household structures of the time. Households were mainly composed of nuclear families rather than extended clans. Marriages were monogamous, close kin marriages were avoided, and descent was traced through both maternal and paternal lines. According to Steffen Patzold, these patterns correspond closely to late antique written sources and demonstrate the lasting influence of late Roman social norms into the early medieval period.

Genetic foundations of southern Germany

From the seventh century onwards, these processes resulted in a population that is genetically very similar to that of present-day southern Germany. The northern ancestry component became increasingly prominent while both original groups contributed to the genetic structure of the region. According to Joachim Burger, this development shows how the upheavals of late antiquity gradually formed the basis of the population structure of central Europe that can still be observed today.

The study was funded by the German Research Foundation within the research group Migration and Mobility in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages at the University of Tübingen and by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The collaboration included Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, the University of Freiburg in Germany, the Bavarian State Collections of Natural History, the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Monuments, the Hesse State Office for Monument Preservation, the Musée de l Homme and the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris, as well as additional partners in Germany, England, Spain, Italy, Austria, Serbia and Switzerland.

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Journal

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-026-10437-3 

How the Nile helped an ancient Sudanese city thrive for centuries

 

Peer-Reviewed Publication

University of Michigan

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image: 

Panoramic view of Jebel Barkal (ancient Napata), a UNESCO World Heritage site in northern Sudan, with its sandstone outcrop and royal pyramids.

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Credit: Gregory Tucker

ANN ARBOR—The ancient city of Napata, located in what is now Sudan, was a major urban and cultural center of Kush, an ancient empire in Nubia.

University of Michigan archaeologists and earth scientists examined the land underlying the city to determine what geological processes might have led to the city's successful settlement. Their findings suggest Napata, which flourished from about 800 BCE to 100 CE, owed its staying power to a relatively stable Nile, which deposited millennia of clay and built up a thick and fertile floodplain, creating a landscape that reduced flood risk while maintaining access to water.

The U-M study, led by archaeologist Geoff Emberling, geomorphologist Jan Peeters and El-Hassan Ahmed Mohammed, who along with Emberling directs the Jebel Barkal Archaeological Project, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The Napata site is one of The Klinsky Expeditions, a series of five archaeological field projects funded by U-M alum Steve Klinsky.

"Scholars have looked at the association between changes in climate and local environment and their impact on societies, including their political development and economic systems," said Emberling, a research scientist at the U-M Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. "But this hasn't been done in Sudan, and we've missed a key tool to help us not only understand the rise and fall of individual settlements, but also the broader history of the rise and fall of the Empire of Kush. This is really the first systematic geomorphological study in Sudan that relates to these ancient cultures."

Kush was an important player in the ancient world, Emberling said. The empire was mentioned in the Bible, by the Greek historian Herodotus, and interacted with Egypt, the Assyrians, Greeks, Persians and with the Roman Empire. After the Egyptian empire collapsed at around 1200 BCE, the Kushite dynasty came into power, based at what's now called Jebel Barkal, whose ancient name was Napata. There, at the foot of an ancient sandstone outcrop, the Kushites built palaces, pyramids and temples. Now, Jebel Barkal is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

"They were part of that whole world system, yet because of a history of relatively lower investment in research in Sudan, some very basic questions haven't been addressed," Emberling said. "We might think we know all we need to know about the Nile because there's been a fair amount of research in Egypt. But in Sudan, the way the Nile works is different."

The gentling of the Nile

In Sudan, the geology of the region creates rapids, waterfalls and islands along the Nile that disrupt travel and fragment settlements, according to Emberling. To understand the geology underlying Jebel Barkal, Peeters led a research team including a group of local Sudanese that drilled 26 sediment cores across the river valley in which the city is situated. 

The team collected samples every 10 centimeters, with the boreholes eventually reaching between five and 13 meters deep. Using a technique called optically stimulated luminescence dating, which dates samples by determining the last time sand grains were exposed to light, the researchers were able to peer into 12,500 years of Nile history.

For the first 8,000 years of this period, the Nile carved its own valley, according to Peeters. Then, about 4,000 years ago, the valley leveled out, allowing the river to start depositing sediment and building up the valley floor. From that time period on, the river has been relatively stable—composing a layer of fertile clay and silt about 10 meters thick. 

The researchers say another geologic feature, the Nile's Fourth Cataract, also helped the river slow and allowed it to drop sediment at the site where Napata would eventually thrive. The cataracts of the Nile are stretches of islands and fast-moving rapids. The Fourth Cataract lies just upstream of Jebel Barkal, and Peeters surmises that much of the river's energy dissipates over the stretch of this cataract, allowing the river to deposit sediment and become relatively stable for 4,000 years.

"Where sediments accumulate shapes where people can live, farm, and carry out cultural and religious practices,” Peeters said. 

The precarity of war

The researchers say this work is ongoing, even as Sudan experiences its current war. Sudanese archaeologists, members of Sudan's antiquities department, known as the National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums, have been carrying out work at Jebel Barkal, guided by Emberling and others abroad.

"Despite all the difficulties and hardship of Sudan, because of the ongoing war, research is continuing through the efforts of our local collaborators," Peeters said. "Their work is central to the project, which places strong emphasis on community engagement and collaboration with Sudanese researcher.

Co-authors include Timotheus Winkels, Pawel Wolf, Tim Skuldbøl, Elizabeth Chamberlain, Saskia Büchner-Matthews and Sami Elamin.

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2529986123