Creating the funerary landscape of Eastern Sudan

Abstract

Funerary landscapes are eminent results of the relationship between environments and superstructural human behavior, spanning over wide territories and growing over centuries. The comprehension of such cultural palimpsests needs substantial research efforts in the field of human ecology. The funerary landscape of the semi-arid region of Kassala (Eastern Sudan) represents a solid example. Therein, geoarchaeological surveys and the creation of a desk-based dataset of thousands of diachronic funerary monuments (from early tumuli up to modern Beja people islamic tombs) were achieved by means of fieldwork and remote sensing over an area of ∼4100 km2. The wealth of generated information was employed to decipher the spatial arrangement of sites and monuments using Point Pattern Analysis. The enormous number of monuments and their spatial distribution are here successfully explained using, for the first time in archaeology, the Neyman-Scott Cluster Process, hitherto designed for cosmology. Our study highlights the existence of a built funerary landscape with galaxy-like aggregations of monuments driven by multiple layers of societal behavior. We suggest that the distribution of monuments was controlled by a synthesis of opportunistic geological constraints and cultural superstructure, conditioned by the social memory of the Beja people who have inhabited the region for two thousand years and still cherish the ancient tombs as their own kin’s.

Holocene geomorphological and pedosedimentary archives of eastern Sahelian paleoenvironments (Kassala, Sudan)

“…The picture was taken in early December, when the ephemeral summer prairie has already dried up and only xerophytes and acacias survive on lower ground. In the foreground, the square stone structures are Medieval Islamic tombs called qubbas (Costanzo et al, 2021b). (b) Picture of the chosen section, cut by one on the countless small rills and gullies furrowing the inselberg’s pediment.…”

“…For this reason, the strip of land comprised between the Gash and the Sudanese-Eritrean border, which amounts to roughly 5000 km 2 , is still mostly unexplored both from an archaeological and paleoenvironmental point of view. Nonetheless, a few published works upon the late Medieval Islamic funerary monuments scattered in the landscape (Costanzo et al, 2021b; Crowfoot, 1922; Elsadig, 2000; Paul, 1952) and a newly identified relevant Gash Group site located at the foothill of a large rocky outcrops (Giancristofaro, 2021) are starting to define the effective archaeological potential and value of the region.…”

Point Pattern Analysis (PPA) as a tool for reproducible archaeological site distribution analyses and location processes in early iron age south-west Germany

“…On the other hand, second-order properties describe inherent spatial dependency within the point pattern [ 47 ], such as attraction or repulsion, and occur when a point’s location is influenced by the presence or absence of other points [ 48 ]. Ecological studies commonly use point pattern analyses [ 48 , 49 ], and these methods have increasingly been applied in archaeological research [ 2 , 6 , 35 , 36 , 50 , 51 ]. Point pattern analysis provides a clear terminological frame that naturally highlights issues of interaction with the environment (first order properties) and with other sites (second order properties) (see Fig 2 ).…”

Looking at the Big Picture: Using Spatial Statistical Analyses to Study Indigenous Settlement Patterns in the North-Western Dominican Republic

“…To study the spatial relationships of the Indigenous settlement patterns, we focused on applying Point Pattern Analysis, which is simply defined as the study of the spatial arrangement of points in space (Riris, 2020;Costanzo et al, 2021;Carrero-Pazos, Bevan and Lake, 2019). When the intensity of the point pattern is constant, i.e., corresponding to a stationary and isotropic process within the region, it is called a Homogeneous Poisson Process (HPP).…”