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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

I mean, you can see this possibly with things like the Hopewell culture in America.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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