Saving lost civilizations
“I couldn’t do an office job,” says Pawel Wolf, sitting in the glaring Sudanese sun on a dirt road in Karthoum next to a makeshift, open-air workshop where his jeep is being geared up for the trip ahead. The jeep will take him to a wasteland area between Dar el-Arab and Kerbikan on the banks of the Sudanese stretch of the Nile and it better be in shape. No other car is likely to pass by soon if it breaks down in that area.
Archaeologist Pawel Wolf
Wolf, 47, is an archeologist from Berlin. He has come to Sudan for eight weeks to participate in the Merowe Dam Archaeological Salvage Project. Part of an international team, he will try to save and document as many archeological finds from around the Nile before this area will be flooded. In 2007, a giant government project, the building of a dam across the Nile, is scheduled to be completed.
“Our greatest success so far was when we discovered a settlement from between 300 A.D. to 600 A.D. It was the first one ever documented from this time,” explains Wolf. “We could only discover it here, because the area is so remote and abandoned. In more populated areas where new structures have been built, those ancient archeological treasures have long since been destroyed.”
The area along the Nile harbors findings from the middle Paleolithic to the Christian era. In small teams, the archeologists roam through the rocky area looking for signs of ancient civilizations: cemeteries, pieces of ceramics, tools and settlement structures. They map and document everything they find and have brought excavations underway in specific areas.
Eager to get international help for urgent excavations, the Sudanese government promised that 50 percent of all finds may be taken out of the country. Since Wolf is part of a mission financed by the Sudan Archaeological Research Society, most of his discoveries are likely to end up in the British Museum in London.
“In April, the people in the area will be resettled by the Sudanese government. That means that from that time on, there won’t be any houses, no workers to help us and no infrastructure whatsoever. Excavations won’t be possible any longer,” explains Wolf, “I suppose we could set up tents and continue our documentation until 2007 when the flooding starts. After that, all evidence in that area will be lost. In 2008, there will be big lake there, nothing else.”
Currently Wolf and his team can still set up camp in the nearby village Dar el-Arab. They rent village houses to store their equipment but usually sleep outside because of the heat. They use solar cells and a generator for electricity and water from the Nile for washing and drinking. It’s not his first time down there. Since 1992, he’s been spending periods of up to half a year in Sudan. “Once, I was so thirsty that I didn’t purify the water. I got typhoid right away,” recalls Wolf, “and malaria at the same time, so that was indeed a little annoying.” Then he lists “the usual things you can come across in a desert” as he calls them: nose-horned vipers, scorpions and venomous spiders. “But so far no archeologist has ever died from one of those,” Wolf assures.
What motivates him to accept such danger as a part of his everyday life? “I don’t know. That’s just me. I like discovering new things. Just imagine you are standing in a deserted area and you know that there have been settlements there 5,000 years ago and you are the first person to step on that soil in 5,000 years!”
It may also run in the family. Wolf’s father was a geologist. One of his grandfathers a mountaineer, the other one a surveyor. The adventurous young Wolf started his studies in Sudan archeology and egyptology at Berlin’s Humboldt university at a time when the wall separating Eastern from Western Germany was still intact. “Back in the GDR, people often said ‘why are you studying that? Do you really think you’ll ever be able to go down there?’ but somehow I knew I would some day.”
