Archaeologists Search for Lost Royal City in Sudan

News January 15, 2013

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ANN ARBOR—A team of archaeologists from the University of Michigan, Denmark, and Sudan is looking for traces of a lost royal city of the Nubian kings in the Sahara Desert, using satellite imagery, topographic surveys, magnetometry, geological coring, and the notes of early twentieth-century American archaeologist George Reisner. “One of the challenges is that the city’s remnants are completely invisible on the site today,” said Geoff Emberling of the University of Michigan. Very little is known about Nubia’s early kings and the origins of its civilization. “There has been a real lack of excavation of settlements, where you find out where people actually lived on a daily basis,” added Emberling.

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