Our archaeological knowledge of the Sudan is very uneven, and many areas remain almost entirely unexplored.  This was very evident duirng the period of the Condominium when, while the southern provinces were a major focus for anthropological research, they were not regarded  as an appropriate place to 'do' archaeology.   This is perhaps not surprising given the dominance of Egyptology in Sudanese archaeology although more than 50 years ago, O.G.S. Crawford, a great pioneer in many fields of archaeology, wrote a challenging article in Antiquity attacking academic attitudes which were happy to treat large parts of Sudan having no history, or archaeology worthy of study (Crawford, O.G.S. 1948. 'People without a history',  Antiquity 22: 8-12).

A small beginning was made during the late 1970s when the British Institute in Eastern Africa began a research project in the then Bahr el Ghazal and Equatoria Provinces, combining survey and test excavations, ethno-historical and linguistic research.  A number of reports from this work were published in the BIEA journal Azania and elsewhere, as well as in a BIEA Memoir edited by John Mack and Peter Robertshaw ('Culture History in Southern Sudan ' 1982).

There is clearly vast potential in the region as well as fascinating opportunities for interdisciplinary research and probably especially for ethno-archaeological studies .  However, the region obviously has other more important priorities while the long-standing civil war.