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The paper discusses funeral practices with regard to animals in ancient Berenike, investigated in two seasons of exploration, 2018 and 2019 (trenches BE18/19-107, BE01/19-48 and BE19/132). Three groups of animals are represented almost exclusively in the burials. These are cats, dogs and monkeys, buried mainly around the top and on what was the eastern slope of a sand dune. In the mid 1st century AD, an enclosure wall roughly 0.50 m thick was built enclosing a space of about 20 m2 with no apparent floor surface inside it. Outside the wall, a clay pavement surrounded the enclosure on at least three sides. Animal burials accumulated around this enclosure for the next century or so, achieving the greatest density close to the feature. By the 2nd century AD urban rubbish had encroached heavily upon the area taken up by the burials. Most likely in the beginning of the 3rd century AD, the wall was dismantled, perhaps together with the features that had been inside the enclosure (statue, column, tree?). Interestingly, two goats were buried by the two excavated corners (northeastern and northwestern ones) in this period. One of these represented a variant of the species not typical of Northeastern Africa.

The first Affad was the one we saw when the archaeological sites there were first investigated at the beginning of the century. The second Affad, which is the region that we have been exploring in the past 15 years, bore many signs of modern Sudanese culture encroaching upon the desert. In 2009, an asphalt road cut through the desert and shortly thereafter, the Debba bridge and power lines were constructed, the latter coming from a hydroelectric power station on the Fourth Cataract. Affad 3.0 is what the location looks like today—extensive industrial-scale farms on terraces too far away for traditional agriculture. The investment has already caused irreversible destruction to the archaeological heritage. Cattle+ in the title of this article refers to new data on large ruminants. The discovery of auroch remains and the Neolithic cattle data are both extremely important proxies for the adaptation strategies of people inhabiting the Southern Dongola Reach in prehistory.