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
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.
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.
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.
Well, what's curious is archaeologically speaking, there's not a very visible archaeological tradition prior to Nak in this area.
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 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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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