Interregional Linkage Investigations in Northern Kordofan (InterLINK)

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The InterLINK project explores the role of the North Kordofan region as a border and contact zone between the states and cultures of the Nubian Nile Valley with the Sahel regions to the west and southwest, such as the Zankor Group, ancient and medieval Darfur, as well as Kanem-Bornu and other early states and cultures of the Chad Basin. Especially for the Medieval Period, archaeological records in the region indicate close contacts with the Christian states on the Nile, but also with the other neighboring cultures. This can be interpreted as archaeological evidence that the region can be identified with a province of the kingdom of Makuria in the west away from the Nile, which has not yet been localized, but mentioned by source texts from the Islamic Middle Ages. There are preliminary indications that the Christianization and acculturation to the Nubian Nile Valley mainly concerned pastoral groups, and less prevailed in sedentary peasant groups.The region is also of crucial importance in terms of environmental and socio-economic history as a transfer and contact zone. Until today forming a landscape-ecological fringe between the Libyan desert in the north and the Sahel in the south, there are various interactions between different forms of mobile or semi-mobile livestock keeping strategies (cattle pastoralism in the south, camel nomadism in the north), and extensive as well as intensified agriculture. In historical times, various archaeological records (water harvesting installations, agricultural terraces) indicate possibilities for locally bound intensification of agricultural production. One of the aims of the project is to investigate the diachronic development of these different land use and production strategies, their adaption to changing environmental conditions, as well as their integration into the supra-regional environmental and climate history.The combination of environmental framework conditions, socio-economic adaptations to them, as well as their association with certain ideological or religious superstructure constructs also allow comparisons with recent developments: Even today, numerous conflicts in the Sahel region (i.e. in Darfur) are interpreted along comparable socio-economic as well as ideologically-religiously defined lines of social separation, and against the background of changing environmental conditions. The InterLINK project can therefore not only contribute to the general historical questions of interculturality, supra-regional material and ideal transfer processes, as well as regional environmental history, but can also provide an input to modern debates on conflict research and environmental adaptation.