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

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.

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

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.

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.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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