Esh Shaheinab
archaeological site in Central Sudan
Esh Shaheinab is an African archaeological site that was occupied multiple times during the early Holocene. Artifacts from this site exemplify various traditions including the Early Khartoum (8800 to 5000 BP), Khartoum Neolithic (c. 5700-3550 BP, approximately 3750-1600 BC), and Late Neolithic (4th millennium BP).
The site lies approximately 50 km north of Omdurman on the west bank of the Nile in central Sudan. The climate Esh Shaheinab residents experienced was humid and its "wooded savannah" ecosystem ("patches of forest, grass and scrub") depended on large amounts of rain in the summer. Occupants relied heavily on the Nile for fishing while maintaining a hunter-gatherer economy. Remains of domesticated dwarf goats and some sheep indicate some participation in herding however, the remains are so limited that Esh Shaheinab is not categorized as a pastoralist society.
A. J. Arkell was the first archaeologist to excavate the site (1949) with the intention of filling in the gaps that remain between northern and western Neolithic histories in Africa. He excavated hearths riddled with evidence of complex culture and various subsistence practices. After the occupation that left the hearths, during the early Neolithic, it became a burial ground for occupants during the Late Neolithic.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Esh Shaheinab” as archaeological site in Central Sudan. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as archaeological site in Central Sudan. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q109284524. Authority coordinates are 16.062, 32.539. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1600 and 1949.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Esh Shaheinab” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.