monumental structures—fortresses, temples, and palaces—from the pharaonic and Kushite periods and also on the excavation of graves from all periods that would yield objects for museum display. Typically, an expedition worked at the same site for four or five seasons in succession, with a small team of European supervisory personnel and a very large native labor force. The quality of architectural recording and mapping was generally very high, since this work was done by trained specialists, but excavation controls were likely to be lax and written documentation poor. A few scholars like Somers Clarke, F. Ll. Griffith, and Monneret de Villard took a special interest in the numerous ruined churches of Nubia, but in other respects the medieval period was neglected. The numerous and well-preserved Christian Nubian townsites were considered too recent to be of interest, and cemeteries were wholly avoided once it was discovered that Christian Nubian graves contained no objects.

World War II brought an end to all archaeological work in Nubia for more than a decade, but when work by European expeditions resumed in the middle 1950s, British, French, Italian, and German expeditions all began excavating some of the pharaonic and Kushite monumental sites that had been bypassed earlier. At the same time, Sudan’s Government Antiquities Service made its first entry into the field and immediately enlarged the scope of Nubian archaeology by investigating both prehistoric (Paleolithic and Neolithic) remains and medieval townsites.

The High-Dam Campaign and After

At the end of the 1950s, the Egyptian government announced plans to build a new and much higher dam at Aswan, one that would back up the Nile waters for more than 100 miles into the territory of the Sudan and complete the final destruction of what had once been Lower Nubia. The new reservoir would not be emptied in the summer, as its predecessor was, and the sixteen major temples in Egyptian and Sudanese Nubia would therefore have to be either physically removed to higher ground or surrendered permanently to the lake’s waters. Both the Egyptian government and the newly independent Sudanese government (independent of Anglo-Egyptian rule since 1956) chose the former alternative, and the International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia was launched, with great fanfare, in 1960. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), with headquarters in Paris, agreed to provide overall coordination and to serve as a fund-collecting agency for the campaign, and throughout the next decade it generated a steady flow of publicity that served to focus world attention on the archaeology and culture history of Nubia.

Throughout the 1960s, the tremendous engineering feats of temple removal and reconstruction engaged the world’s attention, particularly in the case of the great rock-cut temple of abu simbel. It and most of the other Egyptian temples were taken apart and reassembled on higher ground along the lake shore, close to their original sites. The four temples of Sudanese Nubia were removed to the national capital at Khartoum, several hundred miles to the south of the lake area.

Although much less publicized, the Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia had also a purely archaeological component, which was and remains the largest coordinated body of archaeological work undertaken anywhere in the world. Between 1959 and 1970, when the new lake reached its full contour, no fewer than sixty expeditions, representing twenty-three different countries, took part in the effort to excavate the sites of Lower Nubia before their final destruction. The high-dam campaign, as it came to be known, in effect broke the monopoly of Egyptologists on the study of Nubian archaeology, for the new expeditions included a large number of European and American prehistorians as well as classicists, Africanists, and many other kinds of specialists. The newcomers brought new and often more-advanced excavation methods to the Nubian field as well as a new and more global cultural perspective.

The salvage campaigns were organized somewhat differently in Egypt and in the Sudan. In Egypt, the territory to be flooded was divided into parcels of more or less equal size, and these