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When the two sites were threatened by the planned raising of the Aswan High Dam and the expansion of Lake Nasser, an Egyptian team returned to Ballana in 1959 to excavate those tumuli that Emery and Kirwan had presumed to be plundered and that they had therefore left uninvestigated. These smaller tumuli and tombs did eventually prove to be widely plundered, but Shafik Farid's excavation (1963) was important in revealing more information about the site, particularly in terms of tomb development. Farid's site report gave no indication of the involvement of any other specialists, trained, for example, in the identification of animal remains.
Finally, a team from the Oriental Institute in Chicago (the Oriental Institute Nubian Expedition, hereafter OINE) returned to Qustul and Ballana in the 1970s to undertake widespread excavations of both sites, in an attempt to broaden the scale of previous archaeological activities. This expedition took place before the final flooding of both sites and was led by Professor Keith C. Seele. After his death, the excavations were written up and published by Dr Bruce Beyer Williams. A separate volume was also produced about the many textile finds from the sites (Mayer Thurman and Williams 1979). Seele's approach differed from that of the previous excavators’, since he cleared broad surface areas at the sites rather than simply concentrating on the tumuli as more obvious indicators of archaeological activity. The OINE excavations have made it possible to understand the complex nature of the material at Qustul and Ballana as remains that relate to each other as part of a wider ritual space, incorporating different ritual activities beyond the construction of tombs.
Although the overall survival rate of much of the material from Qustul and Ballana was very high, the sites (Ballana, in particular) have suffered from water damage and some plundering. In some cases, percolating water had caused the roofs of the mud-brick substructures of certain tombs to cave in, or the mud brick had become a mass of mud that was melded together. The action of the water had a detrimental effect on the preservation rate of certain items, in particular, the organic materials that may have been present in the tombs. It would be expected that