The project "Prehistoric communities of the Bayuda Desert in Sudan – new boundaries of the Kerma Kingdom," implemented by the Gdańsk Archaeological Museum in cooperation with the University of Wrocław is financed by the National Science Centre under grant no. 2016/23/B/HS3/00845. As its research hypothesis, the concept was adopted that the Bayuda, located at the crossroads of important communication and trade routes in Africa, was a significant economic base for the prehistoric communities inhabiting the Nile banks in the area between the Third and Sixth Cataracts. The project, implemented in 2017-2018, was discontinued due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, the research conducted as part of the ongoing project has already brought a vast amount of significant new data about the prehistoric communities inhabiting the Bayuda Desert and the transformations that occurred in the network of settlements in the area over the past several thousand years. So far excavations have been carried out at more than 50 sites. During project implementation, new important data was also obtained which may constitute another contribution to the research on climate changes in the North-East Africa region. The current resumption of the research raises hopes for its completion in 2023.

A survey conducted in January 2020 in the area of the fourth cataract, under the auspices of the Sudanese National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums (NCAM), was aimed at identifying a potential site for an archaeological project. The mission was set within the framework of a new programme of fieldwork that found, in the recovery of operations in Sudan, an extraordinary opportunity to give continuity to the ‘historical’ presence of Sapienza in this country as much as to develop a fruitful research agenda. Despite the unexpected difficulties raised by the spread of the Covid pandemic, the planned renewal of activities in Sudan has been moving along two interlaced tracks: firstly, the organisation of a virtual exhibition was aimed at reconstructing, illustrating, and disseminating the most salient aspects of the long history of Sapienza commitment to the safeguarding of the Sudanese archaeological heritage. At the same time, the exhibition provides a relevant background to the upcoming joint mission of NCAM and Sapienza, which will work at Hujair Gubli and the area of Magal. First identified by a Polish mission in the early 2000s, the temple site was never investigated on a larger scale. In this perspective, the research project aims at a qualified understanding of the site within its local context, regional landscape, and diachronic transformation, thus addressing multiple issues and combining different strategies of investigation (archaeology, topography and historical geography, conservation and musealisation). While the virtual exhibition was successfully inaugurated in May 2021 and is permanently available online (http://mostrasapienzainsudan.saras.uniroma1.it/en/) – it was also physically displayed in Khartoum as part of the Integration Promotion Project funded by the Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (Italy) –, the first season of fieldwork is expected to start in autumn 2022. The present paper will present these two recent lines of investigation and cooperation, discussing both preliminary results and perspectives of research.

The Scandinavian Joint Expedition to Sudanese Nubia (1960-64) was part of the UNESCO coordinated international campaign to salvage sites threatened by construction of the second Aswan High Dam in southern Egypt. Uniquely, the expedition involved researchers from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland, generating a wealth of data and a series of nine major excavation reports. Many of the finds, including human osteological material, were exported from the Sudan and are now housed in museum and institutional repositories in all four countries, and most are accessible for further study. Several Scandinavian archaeologists who participated in the fieldwork or worked on some of the materials recovered during the project, went on to develop careers in African archaeology or Egyptology, while others gained prominence in osteoarchaeology or Scandinavian archaeology. However, despite the great success of the SJE and its impact on the careers of several individuals, Nordic country researchers today are poorly represented in the related fields of Nubian studies (especially archaeology), African archaeology, and Egyptology. With generous support from the joint committee for Nordic research councils in the humanities and social sciences (NOS-HS), the Reinvigorating Scandinavian Research in African Archaeology programme of workshops and online meetings, launched in May 2019, has sought to explore the legacies of the SJE, the continuing research potential of the SJE collections and archives, and the opportunities these provide for a new generation of researchers based in Nordic countries to (re-)engage with Nubian materials and African archaeology more generally. This presentation will provide a summary of these activities, the accomplishments, legacies, and interconnections established by the work of the Scandinavian Joint Expedition to Sudanese Nubia, their degrees of entanglement, and the affordances they offer for a new comparative, integrated analysis.