Hans-Åke Nordström Hans-Åke Nordström Hans-Åke Nordström (born c. 1934) is a Swedish archaeologist and professor at Uppsala University. His work has included excavations in parts of Nubia, submerged since the construction of the Aswan Dam, and the development of the Vienna System for classifying Egyptian pottery. Hans-Åke Nordström was born around 1934. During the 1960s he excavated parts of Nubia, an area between Aswan in Egypt and Khartoum in Sudan, which were submerged following the construction of the Aswan Dam. In 1972 he received his Ph.D., on the basis of his thesis "Ceramic Ecology and Ceramic Technology. Early Nubian Cultures from the
Aswan Low Dam in the lower Nile. The dam, originally limited in height by conservation concerns, worked as designed, but provided inadequate storage capacity for planned development and was raised twice, between 1907 and 1912 and again in 1929–1933. These heightenings still did not meet irrigation demands and in 1946 it was nearly over-topped in an effort to maximize pool elevation. This led to the investigation and construction of the Aswan High Dam upstream. The earliest recorded attempt to build a dam near Aswan was in the 11th century, when the Arab polymath and engineer Ibn al-Haytham (known as "Alhazen" in the West)