Terminal Pleistocene and Holocene hunters and gatherers in the eastern Sudan

Excavations by the joint University of Khartoum/Southern Methodist University Butana Project in the area just north of Khashm el Girba on the upper Atbara River have uncovered a series of preceramic and early ceramic occupations by hunters and gatherers which date fromca 10,000 bp toca 6200 bp. The earlier sites show no direct relations with those of similar age in the northern Sudan, while the later, early ceramic sites show only minor similarities with contemporary occurrences in the central Nile Valley. Thus, it appears that the upper Atbara River Valley played no role in the development of the Khartoum Mesolithic and that Nilotic influences were late reaching the eastern Sudan.

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Résumé Des fouilles entreprises par le projet Butana dirigé en commun par l'université de Khartoum et le Southern Methodist University dans la région juste au nord de Khashm el Girba sur le cours supérieur de l'Atbara, ont découvert une série d'occupations précéramiques et céramiques anciennes de chasseurs-cueilleurs, qui datent deca 10,000 bp àca 6200 bp. Les gisements les plus anciens ne semblent pas avoir eu de relations directes avec ceux de la même période dans le nord du Soudan, tandis que les gisements plus tardifs à céramiques ne montrent que de petites analogies avec des occupations contemporaines dans la vallée centrale du Nil. Il semble donc que la haute vallée de l'Atbara n'a joué aucun rôle dans le développement du Mésolithique de Khartoum et que des influences nilotiques n'atteignirent que bien plus tard le Soudan oriental.

     

Gastronomy or Geology? The Role of Nationalism in the Reconstruction of Nations

Abstract. This article considers the debate that has recently developed in studies of nationalism between those scholars who see the nation as a modern and constantly changing construction ex nihilo and those who see it as an immemorial, unchanging communal essence. It outlines the so-called ‘gastronomical’ and ‘geological’ metaphors of nation formation and suggests a synthetic model which balances the influence of the ethnic past and the impact of nationalist activity. It shows that the central question which has divided theorists of nationalism is the place of the past in the life of modern nations. The author recognises the role of nationalists in national mobilisation but stresses that nationalists are not social engineers or mere image makers as modernist and post-modernist accounts would have it, but rather social and political archaeologists whose activities consist in the rediscovery and reinterpretation of the ethnic past and through it the regeneration of their national community.     

Planning in the 1990s: An international agenda

This paper, originally presented to the AESOP‐ACSP joint conference in Oxford in 1991, stresses that both in Europe and in the US, there is a major difference for planning in the switch from boom to recession. During the 1990s a major challenge will be to find new ways of public‐private partnership in financing new urban infrastructure at a time when developer contributions — a major innovation of the 1980s — have dried up. This particularly applies to the European high‐speed train system — one critical element of which will run through the East Thames Corridor, one of Britain's major urban developments in the coming years. In the US, planners are likely to remain more locally focused, less internationally concerned, than in a Europe in which national barriers are rapidly eroding.