Human remains from two cemeteries at Kulubnarti in Sudanese Nubia present an ideal opportunity to assess the biological impact of political and economic change. Remains from the early cemetery come from Nubia's medieval period, characterized by political unification and important achievements in art and architecture. Remains from the second cemetery come from the later emergent feudal age, characterized by regional isolation and return to a subsistence economy. Patterns of mortality, growth, development, nutrition, and disease revealed by the remains converge on one conclusion: the transformation from the medieval to the feudal age at Kulubnarti witnessed an improvement in human health and survival.
Two years ago we published Professor Grahame Clark's Aarhus lecture in which he cogently challenged the invasion hypothesis in British prehistory which had held sway from the time of the pre-archaeological writers such as Beddoe, Rhjk and Rice-Holmes and had dominated thinking about the origins of the ancient Britons among archaeologists for the first h a y of the present century (ANTIQUITY, 1966, 172). Professor W. Y. A d a m , of the Department of
Anthropology in the University of Kentucky, in this article questions the validity of what he calls 'the theory of successive populations', and asks us to refict again on the whole problem of archaeological interpretation in relation to evidence fiom Nubia and elsewhere.
ROFESSOR C L A R K [I] suggests that* The only important difference between the formulation of 1909 and that which is outlined here was in its inclusion of Ptolemaic-Roman instead of Meroitic, which is not found in the extreme north of Lower Nubia. The dates given here are also those which are most generally accepted today rather than those which were proposed by Reisner in 1909.
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