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 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.

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.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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