 Usually when we talk about cosmopolitan communities, I think the past or the present, we tend to think of places that are very well communicated, like ports of trade, commercial hats. Coastal areas are usually very cosmopolitan. But I would like to talk about a place that is, or an area that is very different. It's actually a marginal, it's a peripheral area. It's the borderland between Sudan and Ethiopia. And this is not properly speaking a cosmopolitan place, but it is a place where you can see a confluence of ideas, of material cultures, of traditions. And people in this very remote and uncommunicated area do absorb traditions in different ways. So I would like to talk a little bit about how this marginal area could be conceived as cosmopolitan at least in some periods of its history. And I would like to explain why at some point the Xavier was more cosmopolitan. And at some of the points, it was more secluded and rejected the innovations coming from elsewhere. The borderland between Sudan and Ethiopia is a very old baptism between states, at least from the 30 million BC onwards. This has been a region that lie between two very strong state traditions, those of Sudan and those of Ethiopia. And I've been working there for almost 20 years now. I've done basically ethnological work for like 10 years and during the last five years, I've been doing more archeological work focusing on the Quara region, which is located there in Matema and Quara, which is in northwestern Ethiopia. This is an area of geographical contrast and also of cultural contrast. So you have the highlands of Ethiopia, the limit of the highlands of Ethiopia. This very dramatic scummen. And then you have the lowlands that go towards Sudan. These drastic divide, as I was saying, geographical, but it is also cultural. The cultures of the highlands and the cultures of the lowlands are extremely different. But this is neither Sudan nor Ethiopia. It's a different thing. We cannot see just as a borderland where things more or less resemble those in the highlands or those in the lowlands. It's actually something quite unique. So we have been focusing mostly during the last three years on the Galego River, which is one of the main natural routes leading from Sudan to Ethiopia. It's a seasonal river, like many other rivers in this area of the Horn. And we have been able to document the settlement of this region between the first millennium AD and the 20th, 21st century. The area was basically the populated before the late, mid-late first millennium AD. Before that it was only visited seasonally by hunter-gatherers that were used inolithic technology as late as the late first millennium AD. And then we see transhuman pastoralists arriving to this area during what would be called in Sudan the post-merritic or the early Christian period. So these people can probably unoccupy the river banks of the Galego during the winter season in Ethiopia when there is still some great pasture here. These are very small communities of just a few families decided really, really small, just a few thousand square meters, 3,000, 2,000 square meters. And the material culture is very limited. They only have a few types of pots, which makes sense with a mobile community. And some of these pots are strongly related to the kind of pottery that you find in Sudan during this period. Now the element that is particularly interesting is the spindle wall because these artifacts are exactly the same as those that we find in Sudan for this period. So they are the same that you can see along the blue Nile in Sudan. They typology is extremely similar. The other things they are similar but they are not exactly the same whereas with spindle walls the things that they exactly the same. And my interpretation is that these people they were coming from the periphery of the Sudanese states of the period like the probable kingdom of Sennar, the early Middle Ages or the kingdom of Sova. They were coming from the periphery of these kingdoms. They were absorbing some of the cultural traditions from these areas. And one of the elements that was more important from a symbolic point of view was the spindle wall because it created a sort of common identity between these very remote area and the core of the Sudanese states at the time. Now from the 13th century onwards the situation changes dramatically. These transhuman communities disappear and we no longer have these agro-pastories that are moving through the landscape. We have people that climb the hills and the mountains at these volcanic hills that dot the plains of Quara and Metema and they establish communities up there. The material culture changes quite a lot and these elements that link these people with the Sudan virtually disappear. During the 14th century many of these hilltop sites disappear and people seem to be concentrated in just one of these sites which is Jabal Mahadeed which is occupied between the 15th and the 16th centuries. And it's a very large site with, we have documented over 300 structures, domestic structures and granaries. So there was probably a population of 1,000 people and you have to remember that only three or four centuries before we were talking about very small agro-pastories communities of just 20 or 25 people. So this is a completely revolution for this place. And it was probably motivated by political changes in the Sudan. So this is a time when the kingdom, the Christian kingdom of Sava enters a crisis. We don't know much about what is going on in the kingdom of Sava, in the kingdom of Alodia but it seems that from the 13th century onwards it declines. And the kingdom probably transfers to the south and it's at that time when we have more kingdoms, small kingdoms or chieftains emerging closer to the actual boundary with Ethiopia. And these small kingdoms were probably engaging in a slave raiding in the borderline, near Ethiopia, near the Ethiopianist government. And this is the reason why these people in the first place they go to the hilltops. And then they end up concentrating in this huge site which is naturally and artificially defended because for the first time we document something resembling a rampart. We excavated some of the compounds. The architecture of the site is very well preserved because it's not sedimented, everything is on the surface. We excavated several of the hats and got lots of radio carbon days. And it's interesting to see the process of impoverishment of the material culture of these places. So the connections with the Sudan are broadly lost and the material culture becomes closer and closer. So it seems that people invest less in producing things. Artifacts are less careful. But still there are some connections with the Sudan and these connections are very interesting because they have to do with eating habits. So we have these griddles, these baking vessels, flat vases where they are probably preparing something resembling the Kisra in Sudan, these sort of bread, which is something that is still being done in the area. So it is through these eating habits that they keep a contact with the Sudan. During all these times, during all these centuries, despite that these people are really, really close to the highlands, they are much closer to the Ethiopian highlands and they are to the core of the Sudanese states. They have no contact at all with Ethiopia. We have only one artifact that was imported from Ethiopia at the very end of this period in the late 16th century, which is a piece of Ethiopian pottery, which obviously comes from the highland. And I will explain the reason for this later. But then, during the late 17th century, this place becomes more connected again only during a short period between the late 17th century and the mid-19th century. So it seems that from the late 16th century onward, the place, this area becomes depopulated again and we believe that this causes life rates because this large site I was telling you about, this Jebel Mahadeed, was completely destroyed all the houses are burnt. There are lots of artifacts in this office so it seems that people simply fled. And the places abandoned until the late 17th century when we have an influx of new refugees coming to Ethiopia, escaping in this case from the conquest of the periphery of the font Choltenet that had been established in central Sudan near Sennah in the early 16th century. So we have an explosion of villages at this time. It seems that the area is occupied very fast and very densely in a record time. So we only had one or two sites by the late 16th century, this huge site, this huge refuge on another site. And then 100 years later, we have like 25 sites in the same region. The kind of sites, apparently the villages were very similar to the present settlement that you find in the area, which are indigenous communities of Nile Saharan, speaking Nile Saharan languages. But now the interesting thing is how these people are starting incorporating things from all over the world. We have found Chinese porcelain from the 18th century. We have Indian beads. We have European glass beads. We have Chinese decorated, I mean, painted porcelain. And we have things coming from other places from the Islamic Sudanese tradition like this ablution jar. We have instance partners identical to those that you can find in Nubia or in Sennah. And we have pipes, smoking pipes, which of course are evidence of the introduction of traditions that are global that come in this case from the United States. And this cosmopolitan world disappeared during the mid 19th century due to the token Egyptian invasion and conquest of the Sudan, which ended up with basically the extermination of these people in the borderline. So the sites again become deserted during the mid 19th century. And there is no occupation until the mid 20th century again. So it's like a sort of cyclical history of slavery and recovery from slavery. So to conclude, despite the very marginal character of this region, the Sudanese Ethiopian borderline was always connected to the neighboring state traditions, at least from the late 1st millennium AD. And these connections were always stronger with the Sudan. And for three reasons, some of them are obvious, more obvious than others. The communication is easier with the Sudan through these rivers, like the Galego River, the Blue Nile, the Dinda River and so on. Borderline peoples were originally Sudanese. They were coming from the actual territory of the Republic of Sudan. And they maintain relations with their homelands and their homelands, Sudan, acted as a sort of symbolic reservoir, as has been described for the case of West Africa. So they were using their homelands as sort of area of cultural resources where they could be drawing from time to time. But the main reason, in my opinion, is that Ethiopia saw the borderline always, from at least from the late 1st millennium AD, as a zone of predation. So it was basically a place where they were taking slaves, they were looting the villages and so on. And they really didn't consider these people like real human beings. They were considered them like, they were called Shanghara, which is the erogative term to refer to all black people living in the lowlands. So connections are more intense when cosmopolitan cultures develop at the core of the state. And this is why during the Funch period, during the period the Funch alternating Sudan between the 16th century and the early 19th century, the connections between the periphery and the Sudan were stronger because basically the Funch estate was a multicultural state, which had lots of connections with other regions in the world, but also the very composition of the estate was multicultural, multi-ethnic. So it was open to all the kinds of traditions. And finally, the rejection of alien artifacts is stronger when the borderline is of course perceived as basically a predation zone. And this happened during the late Middle Ages and again during the 19th century. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.