Credited to Sudan. Related wavy line and dotted wavy line wares occur across the Sahara-Sahel belt, so the single point of origin is debated; year range is approximate.
How it began
In 1944 the British archaeologist A. J. Arkell excavated a Mesolithic site near modern Khartoum, on the grounds of the city hospital. He found no huts, but the remains pointed to a settlement used at least from time to time by people who hunted and fished, gathered some wild grain and kept no domestic animals. They made small quartz tools and bone harpoon and spear heads, of which about 270 examples or fragments were recovered.
They also made pottery. Arkell named the culture Early Khartoum, or the Wavy Line culture, after its most typical ware, and published the excavation in 1949.
How it works
No complete vessel survived at Khartoum, but the shapes can be reconstructed as simple bowls with plain rims. The decoration was made by dragging a comb-like tool across the clay before it dried, leaving bands of parallel wavy lines. The tool may have been the spine of a catfish, Synodontis schall, examples of which were found on the site. More broadly, any tool with a serrated edge would serve, including combs and spatulas of bone, shell, wood or clay.
A related style, dotted wavy line, builds the waves from rows of small impressed dots. Arkell saw plain wavy line as typical of the early Mesolithic and dotted wavy line of the later. Early potters tempered the clay with quartz or sand, later ones with organic material.
How it spread
Pottery of this kind is not confined to Khartoum. It has been found across North and East Africa, at sites that lay beside lakes and rivers during the African humid period, when today's deserts were much wetter. It usually occurs together with barbed bone points, the kit of people who lived from the water.
Styles vary by region. Long waves are most common in the eastern Sahara and the Nile valley and shorter ones in the central Sahara and northern Chad. Incised wavy line ware is concentrated between Khartoum and Atbara. Similar pottery from the Lake Turkana basin in Kenya is thought to derive from the northeast African tradition, though that link has not been studied in detail.
What lasted
These wares are among the oldest pottery known anywhere and show that pottery was invented independently in Africa by hunter-fisher-gatherers, well before farming. The oldest dated examples are not from Sudan but from Niger, where a radiocarbon date from Temet places pottery at about 8600 BCE at the latest.
Arkell's work also gave central Sudan its basic prehistoric sequence: an earlier Mesolithic phase with wavy line pottery and a later one with dotted wavy line. He went on to excavate the nearby site of Shaheinab.
Where it stands today
Arkell's scheme has been revised many times. A 2021 review in the African Archaeological Review looks back on seventy years of pottery studies on the Mesolithic and Neolithic of Sudan, starting from the two cultural phases Arkell defined. Sherds, stone tools and bone points from the Early Khartoum excavation are held in the collections of University College London.
