Willeke Wendrich

INFO

Full professor - UCLA (US)

Full professor - Politecnico di Torino (IT)

Egyptian Archaeology and Digital Humanities

ORCID

Digital Nubia: the Co-Creation of a Cultural Landscape

A series of dams built between 1904 and 1960 in the Nile Valley of southern Egypt, has caused incremental and ultimately devastating flooding of the homeland of the Nubian people of Egypt and the north of Sudan. Forced displacement of this entire population to a desert region far from the river, has had a devastating effect on the original population of Nubia. The Nubian culturalnatural heritage has been divorced from its population, either by being displaced or drowned. The third generation of Nubians after the displacement have found their way in Egyptian society, in spite of the shock of displacement and the serious set-backs that their parents and grand-parents lived through. As archaeologists working on the material culture and tangible heritage of Nubia, engagement with these younger generations of Nubians shows that culturalnatural heritages is considered more important than ever. The history and cultural memory of the Nubian peoples focuses on the river Nile, which has always been a steady, yet fluctuating presence in their lives. Digital Nubia is a long-term project to step-by-step recreate a threedimensional VR environment of the Nubian landscape as a locus for memories.