Dr. Kevin MacDonald
Appearances
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
Well, one thing which is rather confounding about them, and particularly when we look at a lot of the statues, or statuettes, which are in the world's museums, virtually none of these statues have come from archaeological contexts. In world museums, virtually every one of these have been looted or come out of looting.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
And something else which is apparent from the actual archaeological excavations which have taken place is that if you do CAT scans of many of these statues in world museums, it's evident that they are kind of a hodgepodge of fragments of statuettes and that they've been refinished or re-plastered to give their surface a smoother appearance.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
Because, and again, getting ahead of myself a bit, it appears that most of these great works of art were mashed up before they were deposited in the ground. So it's very rare to find an entirely intact one.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
So the objects that are often in museums were dug up by, and there's been an enormous amount of looting associated with knot, probably per cubic meter more than any other comparable tradition in Africa. And so people have quite industrially mined the remains of these, which were produced quite frequently by the knot culture. and then improved them.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
If you look at the ones in the monograph produced by the German-Nigerian team recently, you'll see that these are all fragmentary. You're missing heads, you're missing bodies, or what have you. If you look at the ones in various world art museums, you'll find they're perfectly intact.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
So either there is some source for intact statues without abraded surfaces, somewhere that the archaeologists are missing, or as cat scans have shown, these are restored, shall we say. That's probably the most generous term we can give to them. They have been restored. There's no doubt that they're complex. There's no doubt that they're every bit as... amazing, whether fragmentary or not.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
I mean, these restorations are very much true to reimagining the tradition as it's attested to by these objects. But I suspect if you have a perfect and complete terracotta, that some restoration has taken place. Because the actual paste, I mean, I've seen and handled a good number of not terracottas myself over the years. And the paste is very gritty.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
In order to get the smooth look that you see on a lot of the published museum pieces, they have to be sort of refinished and burnished. Now, I imagine some coming out. Well, I don't have to. I know that some are coming out of the ground in better condition than others. But yes, so you can't take the museum displayed objects always at face value.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
But that said, just to add something here, we do know that they are being built in some senses like pottery. They're being coil built. So just like if you're – this isn't the case with every pottery tradition. A lot of pottery traditions use molded – particularly bases for their pottery and so on.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
But if you or I or anyone were learning pottery making in some class, you'd probably start by making these sort of snakes or these coils of pottery and building them up and shaping them. And that's what's happening. If you look inside or, again, use some sort of CAT scan on these statues, what you find is that they're hollow in the interior.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
In some senses, this is statuary meeting pottery technology. Once built up into some more tubular form, they're then worked and perhaps also added to, like pottery would be added to. With pottery, you have things you might add to them that are called, at least archaeologically, nubbins or fillets or pieces of clay that you cut out and then stick on. That's also happening.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
Yes. But if you had to say, this is being very rough, but of their structure, I would say no more than 50% is hollow. So they're quite thick, but I would say about half of their interior is just too deep space.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
Yes. I mean, bigger statues, you know, pushing cords a meter. Wow. Yeah. So that's why, I mean, you know, they're much, what I'm much more used to, because my own work has largely been in the Niger River Basin, I'm much more used to the Dene terracotta tradition. So these are, you know, double, three times, four times the size of Dene terracottas. So they're quite substantial. Yeah.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
I mean, and they come in different size ranges. But yeah, I mean, when I think of them, you know, I think probably you're looking, you know, more like 40 to 60 centimetres or in some cases larger.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
It's, I mean, the Nok tradition is, if it straddles one river, it straddles the Beinu. It doesn't straddle the Niger. So maybe 100 kilometres, 200 kilometres away from the Niger River.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
Well, what's curious is archaeologically speaking, there's not a very visible archaeological tradition prior to Nak in this area.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
I think ultimately, with more work, it will be found, because the thing we would expect prior to this sort of tradition in this part of the world would be some sort of microlithic tradition, perhaps using quartz microliths that might use relatively little pottery, so they might be much less visible in the landscape.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
The Breuning team say that they're not finding anything earlier and that effectively this demonstrates that NOC are migrants because of the millet and because of the type of pottery they have, which is mainly sort of
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
decorated with tools of impression like potter's combs or styluses or what have you, they're thinking this is coming out of the southern Sahara or what would be called the Sahel, the shore of the Sahara farther to the north, where we know that millet was independently domesticated.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
So when we're looking at millet domestication, we're looking at sort of Mali and Mauritania and that sort of zone, and then that this millet is making its way down with agricultural populations which are expanding at that time. So these are people already back in 1500 BC, which is before they're producing any statues or before they're producing iron, that these are
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
food-producing, farming, agro-pastoral peoples coming down from the north, settling in an area which probably only has mobile hunter-gatherers in it, who aren't occupying the landscape in any density. So they push in and start making their many small settlements, small farming settlements. And so initially what they're bringing in is coming from the north.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
But as knock goes on, we know that they are bringing in some things from the outside. And this is most notably Carnelian, which they seem to be very fond of. I mean, many people were fond of Carnelian. The Romans were very fond of Carnelian. And of course, there are several different potential sources for carnelian, which is a red semi-opaque stone that can be quite vivid.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
And so you're making these beads. In Nock's case, they can be both relatively flat, distant-shaped beads, but they can also be tubular, which is much more complicated to make, because you imagine you're having to, you know, they can be a couple of centimeters thick, and you're having to drill this out all the way through. So you're having to use quartz drills to get through this to make
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
These beads, you know, at the time, this is quite a process. And obviously, they would have quite a lot of status attached to them. But where from? And we know that there are carnelian sources in the Saharan highlands. We know that there are carnelian sources in the eastern desert of Egypt.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
Of course, probably some of the finest carnelian, which you begin to see a lot in more recent sort of medieval periods, is this carnelian coming from Gujarat in India. So those are your great sources of carnelian. I rather suspect that this stuff, also just from the look of it, although chemical studies need to be done, is coming either from the Saharan highlands or from Egypt.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
Of course, that doesn't mean direct, but it does mean it's being traded hand-to-hand and getting done. And it's getting done in enough numbers that you can make these enormous necklaces out of it. I mean, this comes from the mortuary archaeology, if not from graves. We also have statues that are just festooned with beads, which from their shape and size look to be carnelian.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
So we're looking at large-scale carnelian trade coming down. Now, whether that is being made in what would be in the Sahara, it would be northern Mali or maybe southern Libya, southern Algeria, that area. or whether it's coming from the eastern desert of Egypt, it's still coming in a substantial way and in quantity.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
And then, of course, you have to ask, well, what is not passing up in return for this, especially since this is before a lot of the mining of metals other than iron in this area, notionally. So you think, well, one possibility is always ivory.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
Because we forget, you know, these days we look at Africa and, you know, you see there are all of these elephant herds in East Africa and Southern Africa and so forth. So you tend to think, oh, that's where the elephants are. But there used to be enormous elephant herds in West Africa. And one of the reasons they had very few elephants, they're not entirely gone.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
I mean, there's one large active herd between Burkina Faso and Mali that goes up and down in that area every year, and which I've visited years ago myself. But it was the transatlantic slave trade and the enormous importation of firearms into West Africa. So in the 18th century, there was a huge import of gunpowder, lead, and firearms all along the West African coast. And that led to a kind of
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
animal wipeout, a wild game wipeout across West Africa. Firearms hadn't come into these areas for so long and in such quantities in Eastern and Southern Africa. So that's why you have these very well-preserved parks of wildlife in those areas. In West Africa, much of its indigenous fauna was wiped out in the 18th century and 19th century by hunting with musketeers.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
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.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
Yeah, it's a theory because, you know, just trying to think, well, what is their offer in terms of trade? And I mean, it could also be precious woods, like types of, I don't know, ironwood or ebony or things like that. That's possible. But a lot of elements of later trade simply were not there yet.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
There was no gold trade, we think, at that time, for example, which was a big driving force earlier on. Of course, the ivory wouldn't preserve at Knock just because of the soil conditions, so we wouldn't be able to say... I can't remember seeing much in the way of referencing ivory in the statuettes themselves. So that was just sort of a spontaneous speculation on my part.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
But they had to have something that would have been enough to allow them to get... large quantities of carnelian in exchange. So yeah, it's a question of what that was.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
Well, the statues themselves are both anthropomorphic or depicting humans or human-like forms, and they're also zoomorphic. So there's one I remember, which is a serpent coiled around a tree and things like that. So you have a wide range of things being depicted. What's incredible is, in terms of the human forms, is how individual they are.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
I mean, it seems like they're showing individual personalities. They have different sorts of hairstyles. Some have facial hair, some don't. You can have individuals that just have goatees. You can have individuals which have sort of more of a fuller beard with a moustache as well.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
Again, you have the idiosyncrasies of individuals who are wearing their hair in a particular way, who are wearing different sorts of adornments in an individual way, who are being presented as, you know, there's not, I've never seen two that are quite alike. But additionally, you have statues which combine human and animal forms. Ah, interesting.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
So, for example, you have sort of a genre where you have depictions of people with bird beaks. So he's sort of combining these aspects. But I would say the majority are depictions of human beings and individuals. And so the question then is, are these human beings of this earth, or are they imagined for sort of godlike or ancestral figures? And what are they being used for?
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
And the old idea, so the first archaeologist to work on the Nocte Calus and publish a book on them was Bernard Fagg. One of his hypotheses was that these might have been, because they're sort of tubular and they're hollow, right? I mean, they're not, they do a lot to disguise the tubular nature, but he was saying they could be used as finials at the entrances of houses.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
So almost like house markers, you know, where you'd have them stuck up outside your front door. That's also to explain why there are so many of them.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
If every house has one, then that's sort of... In terms of the number of finds and the likelihood of finding such objects, much greater for knock than, say, the comparable terracotta tradition, which is the Djinne terracotta tradition in Mali, or indeed other traditions in Niger and so on. This is, of course, where this new research project in the 2000s
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
really move things along because it began excavating knock sites and find spots in quantity and this is where it becomes clear that you have you know these statues are fragmentary you you say you're you find a pit and you're excavating a pit and you start finding terracotta fragments in it And then you get them all out or you do a block lift, as you might do here or anywhere else.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
You do a block lift of all the stuff and then excavate them in the lab. And you find out that you've got no single intact statue. You have not even one that's broken up. You have several that have been broken up, incomplete, and put into a pit. And again and again, not finding intact ones. And why are they going into these special disposal pits?
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
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.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
And then as the project continued, it became apparent that a lot of these pits, and perhaps one ultimately might find all of these pits, are in proximity of cemeteries. Oh, okay. So there's a mortuary tradition going along with this. And then you have to come up with an explanation of... You know, why aren't these going into graves intact? Why are they being broken?
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
Why are they being broken in multiple ways and mixed up? You know, is there some place where they're intact? We're not finding them. You know, are they being used as, like Bernard Fagg said, are they being used as finials on houses? And then, you know, when that person dies, you take them down and break them.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
It does make me think, I mean, there are several traditions like this, but in terms of ones that I'm personally familiar with, you have this process amongst the Sanufu of Mali and then an area south of Mali as well. But where I've seen this is in Mali. where there is the disposal of the things of the dead. And I mean, you can see this elsewhere in the world.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
I mean, you can see this possibly with things like the Hopewell culture in America.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
Yeah. Where you have these, you know, lots of grave goods or lots of objects deposited after someone's dead. And, you know, the hypothesis is this is like a radioactive waste containment chamber sort of notion that these objects have power. or as one would say in the man-made world, nyama.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
So they have power, and they're associated with certain individuals, and in order to keep those individuals from still acting in this world after their death, you need to contain those objects, you need to smash them so they're no longer intact, you need to mix them up, and you need to bury them when you're burying the dead.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
So in the Sanufu areas that I'm familiar with, you have a situation whereby when someone dies, the last water glass they were drinking from, you're going to dispose of that. If it was a woman and she had her heart stones, you're going to dispose of them.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
If you have pots or other objects that someone was using, particularly in the last couple of months before their death, you're going to take these all to an area near the cemetery and you're going to smash them and mix them up so that they cannot return and act through those objects.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
And I'm not saying this is the same thing, but I'm saying it's a model of some reasons that these are objects which could have been very actively used during an individual's lifetime. But then after their death, they become dangerous. And so you have to smash them up.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
And again, that's, you know, in terms of coming up with explanations, that's an explanation for why they're quite consciously not allowing a statue to go entire, even if broken up into a whole.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
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.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
Yes, and building in some kind of flaw is definitely one way to do that. But one hopes that research will continue in the broad NOC culture area, and that eventually we might find, for some reason, these objects intact. But if there's something similar, working on various TEL sites associated with the Empire of Ghana and the Empire of Mali, is that
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
When you have abandonment layers in these tell sites, which have layer upon layer of houses, and you're consciously abandoning one, probably because of a death or some tragedy, and you're leaving objects, say, that were in a house within the house, oftentimes you'll break out the bottoms of the pots. So you're sort of killing the pots.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
And again, it's the same sort of thing that intact objects have power. And so you break things to drain the nyama out of them, as it were, to get rid of the spiritual power from these objects.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
Okay, well, yes, your question makes me think of a lot of different things. One, of course, is that from the clay studies which have been done, these are being made out of a singular chosen clay source, which means that the actual place of manufacture is probably quite concentrated. Also, since we're looking at a people who become blacksmiths in quantity,
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
Of course, in many parts of Africa, you know, blacksmith lineages are quite isolated. They marry into themselves. They keep themselves to themselves because they have this transformative power. So one would imagine that the same people who might be considered the most powerful blacksmiths might be the people who are making these objects.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
But another thing which comes to mind is the degree, because again, you know, we're Part of NOC is on the Bennu, although it doesn't run quite right to allow things to flow through the area. But... It's remarkable the degree to which different areas of production can be concentrated. So years ago, I worked in a very ancient town in Mali called Diyar.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
And in Diyar, there were a group of potters who had become specialists in making these particular sort of water pots called jidaga. And jidaga are really indispensable in the cell. They cool your water. They're the sort of a central point of any household is having a couple of really good jidagas. And they are a very typical wedding gift.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
So, you know, if you're newlyweds, they get jidagas, but they get jidagas from these people in Diyan. And so every day, it would seem, a letter would travel upriver or downriver to these potters, and they would say, this is what we want on the pots, because they put, like, the people's names, and we need it delivered by this date.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
And then every day there would be perogues of these water pots all stuck up, which would go downriver and sort of deliver them all the way along. So for more than 100 kilometers in both directions, custom water pots were being distributed. So you can imagine a situation with NOC. And we do. I mean, there is remarkably one NOC terracotta of two people in a boat. They definitely were using boats.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
and then continuing really on to maybe the first century AD.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
But you do think that people are commissioning these. I mean, maybe while you're alive, if you're a family leader, you go to this making area and they sort of do a portrait of you or some sort of caricature of you.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
that they then supply to you maybe it's you know maybe if it's a point of pilgrimage or something you know you have to it's someplace you have to go to it's like going to the big city you go down there instead of getting your photograph made or your portrait painted or whatever you get on and you have a terracotta made of you if you're important and you bring it home and then you put it somewhere outside of your house or you use it in some sorts of ceremonies
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
But when you die, then it's so associated with you. At some point, it has to be broken. This is just me hypothesizing that.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
Right, so if you're looking at narcoprenology, so they're coming into the area with polished stone and napstone artifacts and pottery. around 1500 BC. And then somewhere around 800 BC, the terracotta production begins and iron production begins, more or less the same time. I'm sure they don't map neatly onto each other, but at the level of resolution we have, that's what it looks like.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
And also, what's interesting is in terms of looking at the connections between the terracottas and the iron, recent excavations at Janjala, find a fragmentary terracotta as an offering in each decommissioned iron furnace. So just, you know, underlining the link. But, so iron smelting at 800 BC, what does it mean?
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
Well, the problem, there's been an ongoing research dispute in Africa over whether or not iron metallurgy is indigenous or not. And this has been going on since the 1970s. NOC has played a role in this. For a long time, one of the earliest African iron smelting sites was Tarugo, which was a NOC site.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
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.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
Since then, we know that there are definite areas of older iron smelting, particularly in Senegal, perhaps in Rwanda, areas where you're pushing perhaps above 800 BC. There's a problem in that 800 BC is around a point where there's a flattening in the radiocarbon curve because of solar radiation, where everything between about 800 and 500 BC technically dates the same.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
It's like everything is neutralized in that band. So if you get something that dates 600, it could mean 800. If you get something that dates 800, it could mean 500. So this is a really unfortunate place for iron to be invented in Africa. What you need are things that are dating to around 1000 outside of this flattening in the curve. And then, you know, we're over that particular hump.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
There are some dates, which I believe, and of course, it's also always a matter, you know, there's always people are always debating the rightness or wrongness of dates. But, you know, Senegal around 900 BC to 1000, I think it's possible. But I'm not one of the metallurgical specialists, and they tend to defend their ability to make these sorts of declarations. So everything remains up in the air.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
The difficulty is that Africa has not yet been shown to have what would be called a Bronze Age or a Copper Age elsewhere in the world. And the idea is, in terms of the steps of technology, you need to understand how to smelt copper or to make bronze before you can go to iron, because iron making is more tricky than those other things.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
There is some argument that you could go straight to iron, but nobody's ever really been very happy with that. It would require a lot of coincidences.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
So we might not see it in my lifetime, but personally, I believe we will eventually find that there is a copper age in Mauritania and that this leads to an indigenous creation of iron technology in Africa, probably in the area of Mauritania, Senegal, something like that. That's my own. I'm putting it out there. A lot of people might disagree, but that's my instinct.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
We can see in about 50 years time if I'm right or not. If this recording is preserved, we shall see. That is my prediction. This is definitely early. It's not quite old enough to be the point of the creation of this technology, but it's very early. And so we know that they're making both absolutely critical tools like Axis,
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
So for forest clearance, for working wood and everything, so axes and adzes are being made out of iron, but also bits of personal endowment. So iron rings, whether bracelets and necklaces, are being made also. So it's both functional and prestige-oriented at the same time. And the sorts of furnaces are distinctive. They're what we would call low furnaces and they're bellows driven.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
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.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
So, you know, with the bags on the pipes, which are called tuyères, which are being used to control the process. and the atmosphere inside the chamber and so forth. And a good number of intact furnace spaces have been found. So these are relatively small diameter furnaces, maybe a meter, meter 20 in diameter, anywhere from 80 centimeters to a meter 20.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
And as is often the case with such furnaces, you have sometimes dedicatory offerings, which are beneath the furnace. And then when you close the furnace, you also do something. Close the furnace. Sometimes you might find a pot. I'm not talking so much about knock. It's more broadly than Africa. You might find a pot or you might have certain medicines buried beneath.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
But the making of iron is a sacred process. It's an ideological process. It's giving birth to something which was not there before. And so in a sense, smiths are almost like sorcerers. And also, therefore, that makes it to me all the more probable that the Smiths are also linked to the making of these statues.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
If we look at much more historic situations, again, in the Mandate world, so particularly in Mali, and there's a great book by McNaughton on the Mandate blacksmiths, which is worth looking at. because it gives a lot of the historical context of blacksmiths in this area. You know, blacksmiths are a caste in and of themselves. They're part of what's called the Nyama Kalah, those who shave Nyama.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
And generally speaking, in the Mandate world, within blacksmith families, the men can make sort of magical earthen They also obviously do all the metalworking and the metal smelting and the creation of the metal objects. But the women within the blacksmith caste, which is referred to as the Numu, they do the pottery making.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
So, you know, and that's not just in the Mandae world, it's in other parts of Africa as well, that you have cast blacksmiths. So this is very, you know, early on, and as before, generally people want to talk about there being casts in Africa.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
But, you know, this is a group that's doing absolutely amazing things with terracotta at the same time as they're doing absolutely pioneering things with ironworking.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
Well, this is what's peculiar, because Nock just kind of fizzles between 300 BC and the first century AD. Date-wise, because we tend to grade... the intensity of occupation on the landscape by total numbers of radiocarbon dates for a period, because we're trying to date as many things as we can. And so there's like a steep cliff, a fall-off in our numbers of radiocarbon dates after 300 BC.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
They don't just go away entirely, but they they fade. And then we have nothing after the beginning of the first century AD that we can ascribe materially to Nock. And there are other things which come into the area that look very different, very different pottery traditions and so forth. So Nock just kind of disappears.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
There's this sort of peak intensity between 800 or at best 900 BC, might have the earliest terracottas by then. But more certainly from 800 BC, 300 BC, it's just a cliffhedge drop-off. So something happens then. There are all sorts of things one can invoke. You could say there could be conflict, there could be environmental collapse. These are all the sort of things we tend to use as explanations.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
But there is no good evidence yet to explain that collapse. And then, you know, there is nothing very special in the area for a while after that. That said, Nigeria remains one of the peak areas in Africa for technological sophistication.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
So, you know, it's centuries later, but farther south in the Igbo area, you have sites like Igbo Uku, which has some of the most fantastic bronze artwork ever created. I mean, globally, amazing work and technology. So, you know, that's happening from maybe 800 at the earliest, probably closer to 900 or 1000 AD. You have at Ife, and, you know, not to mention Benin, but at Ife...
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
you have these fantastic naturalistic sculptures of rulers and high-casted people, you know, sort of nobility or whatever, which are, you know, utterly naturalistic, amazing sculptures. And then also at Ife, the work of Tunde Babalola, it's clear that there is early glassmaking and extensive and very sophisticated glassmaking at Ife.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
So there is sort of a gap of maybe a thousand years between knock and what comes later in terms of high technology artwork, but it does come. And so it's almost a foreshadowing. But the other thing I would just bear in mind in all of this and I always say this, this is what we can see. What we can't see is all of the wooden sculptural traditions.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
I mean, there's very little wood artistry in Africa, which for obvious environmental and preservation reasons, we can maybe look back a few hundred years at best. But probably before there was knock terracotta statuary, there was wooden statuary. And running along with all of these different traditions, there's probably highly artistic woodworking.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
We see the sort of tools that they would have used. We have small woodworking tools even from 2000 BC, 1000 BC. So what we can't see are the wooden sculpture traditions, which have now largely vanished. But we get some idea about what survived and what was documented in the 19th century and the early 20th century.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
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.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
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.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
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.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
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.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
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.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
So in context, they're in village sites or cemetery sites, which are not really very far beneath the surface at all.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
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.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
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.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
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.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
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.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
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
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
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,
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
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.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
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.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
So you have cattle which are sort of just about waist height. Wow. And the sort of sheep and goats which you find in petting zoos and things like that, the really dinky ones, those are also coming out of this sort of dwarfing due to adaptation to various disease vectors, to be able to survive these disease vectors. And so probably you had this sort of livestock.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
Certainly you had, they would have been hunting whatever game was available. But yes, we're looking at small farming communities, but which are doing very advanced things for their time. Real artistic pioneers in Africa and also potentially pyrotechnological or metallurgical pioneers as well.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
What you have, and this is often the case in this time period in various parts of West Africa, is you have the chance encounter of buildings with fire. So whether from hearths or whether from actual full-scale conflagrations, you have the fact that buildings get burnt and you have some very clear burnt walls wattle and daub remains.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
So in other words, clay fragments which have stick marks in them or pole marks on them, which give us a clear idea that you have sort of the latticework of some sort of wood being overlaid with a mud plaster. There are also some remains of stone foundations for structures at some sites where stone was more readily available.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
So you're probably looking at circular structures, maybe even conical sort of structures, but effectively wooden earthen structures. And of course, there would be many of these in any given settlement.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
Yes, clay was the thing. But again, there have been some very interesting studies done. on all of the clay from the pottery and these statues at the NOC sites. And what's been found is that the clay which is being used for pottery is very diverse, that every settlement was obviously making pottery from clay sources which were near to them.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
And so there's every evidence that pottery is a very localized production. However, very interestingly, the statues or statuettes of Knock seem to have made very similar clays, which would imply a more standardized production for them or a more centralized production for them across this rather vast landscape.
The Ancients
Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok
Knock is covering an area which is almost the size of England, so it's a good-sized place where all these different sites are distributed. But the statuettes are always the same and the pottery is always different.