were awarded as excavation concessions to various foreign expeditions with the understanding that each expedition would dig whatever was encountered within its territory. This requirement was not always followed in practice, with the result that a number of important sites were destroyed with little or no investigation. The Egyptian Antiquities Service (now the Antiquities Organization) took one concession for itself but otherwise maintained no overall coordination of the work of other groups.

Although the area to be flooded in the Sudan was considerably smaller than that in Egypt, the archaeological challenge was substantially greater since this area had not been previously flooded as had much of Egyptian Nubia. The Sudan Antiquities Service (now the Directorate-General of Antiquities and National Museums) adopted a practice of giving each foreign expedition an individually negotiated concession including just those remains in which the archaeologists were particularly interested and for which they had the resources to carry out the job effectively. Under this procedure, only about one-third of the territory of Sudanese Nubia was awarded to foreign expeditions while the remainder was surveyed and excavated by a team from the Antiquities Service itself. The technical and supervisory personnel of the Antiquities Service team were actually provided by UNESCO, and the group’s operation has come to be known as “the UNESCO archaeological survey of Sudanese Nubia.” The team was headed for the first seven years by William Y. Adams and for three subsequent years by Anthony J. Mills.

The UNESCO-Sudanese team maintained a coordination and documentation center in the town of Wad Halfa, where a complete file was kept continually up to date of all the sites being recorded and excavated by all the expeditions. The team was thus able to arrange its own field priorities in such a way as to supplement rather than to duplicate the work of the foreign expeditions, concentrating especially on medieval sites and on very early sites that were of little interest to most other archaeologists at the time. It was hoped that the various separate parts of the Nubian campaign in the Sudan would, in the end, add up to something like a comprehensive, overall picture of Nubian cultural history with no significant gaps. The single most-outstanding achievement of the UNESCO-Sudanese team was to develop a cultural chronology for the thousand-year Christian Nubian period, including developmental typologies of pottery, house architecture, and church architecture.

Since Nubia in 1960 had already been the scene of extensive archaeological activity for half a century, it was inevitable that the high-dam campaign, for all its concentration of effort, should enlarge rather than drastically revise the previously known record. There was, however, one spectacular and wholly unexpected discovery: the buried cathedral at Faras with its well-preserved program of wall decoration. It was already well known, from the numerous standing church ruins in Nubia, that these buildings had once been elaborately decorated, but the ravages of time and Muslim vandalism had left only scraps of the paintings in most cases. The Faras Cathedral, however, had been sanded up and abandoned before the end of the Christian period, and thus a great many of its paintings were preserved intact. This find and the subsequent discovery of three other buried churches made it clear that medieval Nubia had developed its own elaborate and distinctive artistic tradition, different from that of Coptic Egypt. Medieval Nubian mural art has since become a major field of art history study.

Many of the archaeologists who took part in the high-dam campaign continued to work in Nubia in subsequent years, mainly in the areas upstream from the flooded northern portion of country. Particularly important have been the Swiss excavations at Kerma, a site first investigated by the Harvard-Boston expedition in 1913–1915. Although the earlier archaeologists concentrated on the great royal and noble tombs, the Swiss over a dozen years methodically uncovered an enormous townsite with a very long history, including numerous shrines, granaries, workshops, and palaces. Their work has revealed that the indigenous Nubian civilization before the area was overrun by the pharaohs had reached a much higher level of complexity and centralization than was previously thought.