Dr. Kevin MacDonald

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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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The Ancients · Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok · 30 Mar 2025 podcast

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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