From settlement patterns to memory of place among Holocene hunter-gatherers at Sai Island, Middle Nile Valley

Persistent places are the locations where people aggregate, utilise and reuse natural or built features and develop their social identities and interactions. A network of persistent places forms interconnected persistent settlement patterns, which create a humanly made or storied landscape with a shared community-based memory of place. Although it has been demonstrated that persistent settlement patterns long preceded the onset of Neolithic farming villages, the Levant has received the most attention regarding this perspective. At the same time, Africa still needs to be addressed. This paper provides an illustrative case study of persistent settlement patterns created by Holocene hunter-gatherers in the Middle Nile Valley of Sudan. It employs geostatistical patterning and visual mapping of an extensive collection of different classes of artefacts (lithic industry, hammerstones, ground stone tools and pottery) from a well-preserved Khartoum Variant site on Sai Island and correlates them to complex architectural features exposed on an archaeological surface (Level 1) at site 8-B-10C dating to the early fifth millennium cal. BC. The combination of multiple in-depth geostatistical analyses of a complex habitation system successfully documents an exceptionally preserved planned intra-site settlement organisation maintained over several generations, revealing a memory of place.