Esh Shaheinab

The type site for the Khartoum Neolithic in the Sudan, dated to the second half of the 4th millennium BC. Fishing was evidently of major importance and was conducted both by means of shell fish-hooks and with harpoons whose barbed bone points were pierced for attaching a line. Edge-ground axes and adzes were made of bone and stone. The microlithic stone industry and the pottery were very similar to those from Early Khartoum. Domestic stock has radiocarbon dates of 5300 bp.

A site near the eastern bank of the Nile, 50 km downstream from Khartoum, dated to the second half of the 4th millennium be. For long the only fully investigated manifestation of the so-called ‘Khartoum Neolithic’, the site was held to illustrate the small-scale beginnings of food-production in the Sudanese Nile Valley. New excavations, as at Kadero, show that Esh Shaheinab represents only one, possibly atypical, aspect of a complex economic system. The material culture of Esh Shaheinab, together with the general life-style of the site’s inhabitants, shows much continuity from the older occurrence of Early Khartoum. Fishing was evidently of major importance and was conducted both by means of shell fish-hooks and with harpoons whose barbed bone points were now pierced for the attachment of the line. Edge-ground axes and adzes were made both from bone and stone. The microlithic stone industry and the pottery were very similar to those from Early Khartoum. The animals slaughtered by the Esh Shaheinab people were mostly wild but included a few examples of small domestic goat.