Dr. Kevin MacDonald
speaker
120 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Dr. Kevin MacDonald’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yes, there is no textual record referring to it. And indeed, even the word knock is almost by chance. It comes from the old archaeological custom of naming so-called cultures or traditions or what have you after the first site where they were discovered or defined. So it's not referring to a people or a language group or anything like that. It is purely an archaeological entity.
We're looking at central Nigeria in an area running north and south of the Joss Plateau. So one of the larger modern towns would be the capital, Abuja. So its radius is being continually redefined by archaeological work. But effectively, if you imagine Nigeria, it's directly in the middle of the modern country.
It used to be, when archaeologists were first working on it, that they're imagining something beginning around 500 BC and then running on for a few hundred years after that. As more work has gone on, particularly in the past 20 years, it's become evident that we're dealing with something which has a much longer duration, starting around 1500 BC.
and then continuing really on to maybe the first century AD.
The initial discoveries were these, of course, rather remarkable terracottas, which are associated with this archaeological entity. And they were first discovered in 1928 during opencast tin mining on the Joss Plateau.
There were frequent finds from tin mining, and this led to, at the beginning of the formation of the Nigerian Antiquities Service, them being summoned out to these sites to try and better understand the context of these statues, statuettes, figurines being found.
Yes. Again, thanks to this cooperative German-Nigerian program, which has been going on since I think around 2006 and then went on up until 2017, there was a great number of settlement sites found, so well over 100 sites now. But in the beginning, these were sort of isolated find spots.
And I should rush to outline, if anybody looks online and sees some of the pictures of these opencast tin mining sites on the Joss Plateau, they'll think, how is this possible? You're finding these statuettes tens of meters deep. What sort of timescale are we working at here? A lot of this is, these finds are not being found in context. These aren't village remains of these initial finds.
These are finds that have been part of slope erosion in these areas and carried down due to rains into valley areas and therefore are being found for that reason. So they're not really, in an archaeological sense, tens of meters beneath the surface.
Most of the sites where these are found in better context are just, you're probably finding things a meter below the surface or not too much more than that. if they're in pits, maybe a couple of meters beneath the surface. So you have these fine spots where what had been settlement landscapes are just being eroded down a slope.
I mean, imagine the various cliff shears we have in Norfolk or Suffolk or elsewhere, and things being carried down. That's the sort of thing we're talking about. So sort of erosion, large-scale erosion of soil and things being tumbled down much lower. That's where these come from. These are from essentially disintegrated villages that have been lost off the edges of cliff erosion.
So in context, they're in village sites or cemetery sites, which are not really very far beneath the surface at all.
It would have been greener than today, no doubt. But even today, even though this is sort of a semi-desertic area in parts, The desertic is too strong. Let's say arid area today. You have scattered trees and grasslands today. I expect the patches of forested areas would have been higher, but this would not by any means have been a forested zone at that time.
What's interesting, of course, environmentally, and this might be getting a little bit ahead of things, but the primary crop associated with NOC is millet. And this was a surprise because people were thinking this is too far south for millet. So what it is showing is that this is an area which didn't have too much rainfall. Too much rain doesn't work for millet.
This is an area which is not much off of where the area is today environmentally, probably a bit more tree cover, but it's still largely grassland.
Yes. To give credit to Peter Breunig and his team, who worked for a decade or so in this area, they completely revolutionized our understanding of the settlement landscape. We're looking at relatively small villages, nothing much greater than what would be 100 by 100 meters a hectare. We're dealing with what would be, by archaeological definition, small villages or hamlets.
nothing any larger than that, spaced out relatively evenly on the landscape. And you have the use, particularly of pearl millet, but also as a protein, you have cowpeas being cultivated as well. You have canarium trees being exploited. And interestingly, oil palm, which is in use in the area today, does not appear to have been exploited at the time of not
We have a problem archaeologically in that there is very poor bone preservation in this area because of acidic soils. So it's very hard to tell what was being exploited in terms of livestock or hunted game. We can make assumptions. We can suppose that there might be, because there was elsewhere at this time,
In this part of Africa, if we go particularly towards, say, Ghana to the west, at this time you would have had cattle, and you would have also had sheep and goat. So we sort of assumed that there would be cattle and sheep and goat, probably of dwarf breeds or smaller breeds, because they need to be so in order to be able to survive in more subtly areas like this where you have a lot of tzitzi.
So you need these breeds, which are what we call tropano-tolerant breeds, that can live in these more southerly tropical climes. And the native cattle of Africa and the imported sheep and goat which came into Africa, in order to be able to survive the genetic change which takes place in them, has a sort of consequent effect of dwarfism. So you have size reduction.
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