Merowe Dam Institute Museum of the University of Chicago. Their main problems are the shortness of the remaining time and limited funding. Unlike the large UNESCO campaign conducted in Egypt before the completion of the Aswan High Dam, when more than a thousand archaeological sites could be documented and complete buildings were moved to prevent them from drowning in Lake Nasser's floods, work at the 4th cararact is much more restricted. Since 2006, the archaeologists working for the Merowe Dam Archaeological Salvage Project became accused by environmental and human rights activists as well as the representatives of the affected people of facilitating
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)