Abstract
The EDAR (Eastern Desert Atbara River, 17.65°N, 34.77°E) study area, encompassing a complex of Middle–Late Pleistocene sites in eastern Sudan, lies c. 300 km north of Khartoum between the Nile valley in the west and the Atbara valley in the south. Both Acheulean and Middle Stone Age (MSA) sites have been documented in the region. The present landscape of the area features a wide arid plain, stretching from the lower reaches of the Atbara River (within the large Wadi el Arab) up to the western fringes of the Red Sea Mountains. Although some EDAR sites are being exposed at the modern desert surface, the majority of them are from the stratigraphical context of exposed areas and profiles of abandoned gold mines and/or shafts. Since uncontrolled extraction of gold is being conducted in the Eastern Desert, the EDAR project partially has a rescue purpose. The evidence at EDAR confirms the intensity of human occupation of the desert when the Sahara was periodically habitable during Pleistocene and is of interest because the area is located on a potential migration route of early hominins towards Eurasia.
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Acknowledgements
The research in EDAR area is funded by the National Science Centre in Poland, a government agency supervised by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education (grant nr NCN 2015/19/B/HS3/03562). Investigations are being conducted by the University of Wrocław (Poland) and Al Neelain University (Sudan). Besides the two leading institutions, a team of scholars from various institutions are participating, namely, Shendi University (Sudan), Gdańsk Archaeological Museum (Poland), Korean Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources (KIGAM; Republic of Korea), Gyeongsang National University (Republic of Korea). Laboratory analyses are being conducted by KIGAM, Royal Holloway, University of London (GB) as well as by several Polish laboratories. For the purpose of dissemination of the EDAR project results, a web page has been designed (http://sudan.archeo.uni.wroc.pl/).
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Masojć, M. (2023). Eastern Desert Atbara River (EDAR), Sudan. In: Beyin, A., Wright, D.K., Wilkins, J., Olszewski, D.I. (eds) Handbook of Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20290-2_63
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