Prehistoric Nigeria: The Nok

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It's the ancients on history hit.

I'm Tristan Hughes, your host.

Today we're covering another of those mysterious, too often overlooked ancient civilizations.

A people who lived in ancient Nigeria, known today solely through archaeology, symbolized by extraordinary terracotta figurines.

The Nok Culture.

Search Nok culture in your browser today and straight away images of these striking statuettes appear.

They are some of the most eye-catching examples of ancient art so far found anywhere in Africa, depicting all sorts of subjects.

And unsurprisingly, they will feature heavily in today's conversation.

So, who were the Nock?

Whereabouts in Africa did they live?

And what has archaeology so far revealed about this mysterious Iron Age culture?

Well, joining me to explain all is Dr.

Kevin MacDonald, a professor of African archaeology at University College London.

Kevin dialed in to join us for this chat, and I'm really grateful for Kevin's time to talk all the things the Nock culture.

Rarely does the Nock get the attention it deserves, so enjoy as we delve into its mysterious story.

Kevin, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

Thank you.

Glad to be here.

Let's talk about the Nock culture, and it's about time we explored more of these extraordinary ancient African civilizations or cultures.

But with the Nock, Kevin, is this a culture that we know of exclusively from archaeology?

Yes, there is no textual record referring to it.

And indeed, even the word Nock is almost by chance.

It comes from the old archaeological custom of naming so-called cultures or traditions or what have you after the first site where they were discovered or defined.

So it's not referring to a people or a language group or anything like that.

It is purely an archaeological entity.

When are we talking about and where are we talking about with the NOC?

We're looking at central Nigeria in an area running north and south of the Joss Plateau.

So one of the larger modern towns would be the capital, Abuja.

So its radius is being continually redefined by archaeological work.

But effectively, if you imagine Nigeria, it's directly in the middle of the modern country.

And how big a period of time in ancient history are we talking about with the Nock?

It used to be, you know,

when archaeologists were first working on it, that they're imagining something beginning around 500 BC and then running on for a few hundred years after that.

As more work has gone on, particularly in the past 20 years, it's become evident that we're dealing with something which has a much longer duration,

starting around 1500 BC

and then continuing really on to

maybe the first century AD.

And you mentioned their archaeological work on the Nock.

I mean, how long has archaeological work been going on?

I mean, how long has it been since the Nock have been rediscovered?

The initial discoveries were these, of course, rather remarkable terracottas, which are associated with this archaeological entity.

And they were first discovered in 1928 during tin mining, open-cast tin mining,

on the Joss Plateau.

And there were frequent finds from tin mining.

And this led to,

at the beginning of the formation of the Nigerian Antiquities Service them being summoned out to these sites to try and better understand the context of these statues, statuettes, figurines being found.

And do we know by now, let's say almost 100 years later, as you said, if that was the earliest site that became NOC associated with this archaeological entity, do we have quite a number of sites today in that area of Nigeria that seems to be linked together with similar sorts of artifacts?

Do we have a wider range of archaeological sites today?

Yes.

Again, thanks to this cooperative German-Nigerian program, which has been going on since I think around 2006 and then went on up until 2017.

There was a great number of settlement sites found.

So, you know, well over 100 sites now.

But

in the beginning, these were sort of isolated fine spots.

And I should rush to outline: if anybody looks online and sees some of the pictures of these open-cast tin mining sites on the Joss Plateau, they'll think, how is this possible?

You know, you're finding these

statuettes tens of meters deep.

You know, what sort of time scale are we working at here?

A lot of this is, these finds are not being found in context.

These aren't village remains of these initial finds.

These are finds that have been part of slope erosion in these areas and carried down due to rains into valley areas and therefore are being found for that reason.

So they're not really, in an archaeological sense, tens of meters beneath the surface.

Most of the sites where these are found in better context are just, you know, you're probably finding things a meter below the surface or, you know, not

too much more than that.

If they're in pits, maybe a couple of meters beneath the surface.

So you have these fine spots where what had been settlement landscapes are just being eroded down a slope.

I mean, imagine the various cliff shears we have in Norfolk or Suffolk or elsewhere, and things being carried down.

That's the sort of thing we're talking about.

So, sort of erosion, large-scale erosion of soil and things being tumbled down much lower.

That's where these have come from.

These are from essentially disintegrated villages that have been lost off the edges of cliff erosion.

So, it's in context, they're

village sites or cemetery sites, which are not really very far beneath the surface at all.

And you mentioned that, so central Nigeria, but do we have much idea about what the landscape would have looked like in which these settlements were, well, in which they had their settlements more than 2,000 years ago, or roughly 2,000 years ago?

It would have been greener than today, no doubt.

But even today, even though this is sort of a semi-desertic area in parts today, not desertic is too strong, let's say arid area today.

You know, you have scattered trees and grasslands today.

I expect the patches of forested areas would have been higher, but this would not by any means have been a forested zone at that time.

What's interesting, of course, environmentally, and this might be getting a little bit ahead of things, but the primary crop associated with Hnock is millet.

And

this was the surprise because people were thinking this is too far south for millet.

So what it is showing is that this is an area which didn't have too much rainfall.

Too much rain doesn't work for millet.

This is an area which is not much off of where the area is today environmentally.

Probably a bit more tree cover.

but it's still largely grassland.

Well, Kevin, you can never get too far ahead of yourself on the ancients, so don't you worry.

And in that case, we'll explore the wider story of how they lived first, and then we'll delve into the almost the poster piece of the knock, which are their figurines.

So if they're farming millet, do we know much about their society, how they lived in these villages?

Should we be imagining small farming communities?

Yes.

To give credit to Peter Bruinig and his team, who worked for a decade or so in this area, they completely revolutionized our understanding of the settlement landscape.

And we're looking at relatively small villages, nothing much greater than what would be 100 by 100 meters a hectare.

I mean, so we're dealing with what would be, by archaeological definition, small villages or hamlets, nothing any larger than that, spaced out relatively evenly.

on the landscape.

And you have the use, particularly of pearl millet, but also as a protein.

You have cowpeas being cultivated as well.

You have canarium trees being exploited.

And interestingly, oil palm, which is in use in the area today, does not appear to have been exploited at the time of Not.

We have a problem archaeologically in that there is very poor bone preservation in this area because of acidic soils.

So it's very hard to tell

what was being exploited in terms of livestock or hunted game.

We can make assumptions.

We can suppose that there might be, you know, because there was elsewhere at this time, in this part of Africa, if we go particularly towards, say, Ghana to the west, at this time you would have had cattle and you would have also had sheep and goat.

So we sort of assume that there would be cattle and sheep and goat, probably of dwarf breeds or smaller breeds, because they need that.

They need to be so in order to be able to survive in more southerly areas like this, where you have a lot of tsetsi.

So, you need these breeds, which are what we call trapano-tolerant breeds, that can live in these more southerly tropical climes.

And the native cattle of Africa and the imported sheep and goat, which came into Africa, in order to be able to survive the genetic change which takes place in them as a sort of consequent effect of dwarfism.

So, you have size reduction.

And 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, you know, 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.

And

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.

So probably

livestock.

certainly agriculture.

One more question on the settlements themselves, Kevin.

It sounds like though, from the area of the world that the archaeology is being done, do you therefore have quite a lot of the organic material?

It doesn't survive like the houses that they were probably living in in these villages, it's very difficult to find the remains of those.

The traces that they leave, are they quite scant?

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 or whether from actual full-scale conflagrations,

you have the fact that buildings get burnt and

you have some very clear burnt waddle 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 a sort of a lattice work

of

some sort of wood being overlain 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.

Well, you mentioned in passing the clay, Kevin, and was clay the greatest non-metallic material that they had, or the material that they had that they were able to create this extraordinary, very sophisticated artwork from?

Yes, clay was the thing, but again, there have been some very interesting studies done recently on all of the clay from the pottery and these statues at the NOx 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 Nock seem to be made of very similar clays, which would imply a more standardized production for them, or a more centralized production for them across this rather vast landscape.

I mean, NOC

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.

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What do we think was the process then?

Okay, they've got their clay sources.

They're going to make these figurines, these remarkable statuettes.

Do we know much about the whole process of that, how they made these quite complex artworks?

Well, one thing which is rather confounding about them, and particularly when we look at a lot of the statues, which are 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 these many of these statues in world museums, it's evident that they are a kind of a hodgepodge of fragments of statuettes

and that they've been refinished.

or re-sort of 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

smashed 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 Not, probably, you know 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 that you know in the monograph produced by the German-Nigerian team recently, you'll see that these are all fragmentary.

You're missing missing heads or 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 HepCat scans have shown, these are restored, shall we say.

That's probably the most generous term I 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, you know, I suspect, you know, 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 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.

That's not the context for as you say that that originally they are deposited by the Knox and two thousand years ago.

But that said, I can I just to add something here, you know, we do know that they are being built in some senses like pottery.

They're being coil built.

So, you know, just like, you know, 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, you know,

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.

Right, okay, and shaping them.

And that's what's happening.

You have,

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.

So 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, you know, 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.

But if you mentioned that they are hollow, I mean, surely that adds to, it must makes them even more brittle.

Surely it makes them much more easy to break.

Yes.

But I mean, 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 not very, they're quite thick, but you know, I would say about half of their interior is just deep space.

Fair enough.

Before we explore what they actually depict, just so that we can get a really clear idea of their size, because you've also used words like statuette too.

I mean, Kevin, should we not be imagining very, very big statues?

Were we thinking 30 centimeters high, roughly?

Or what should we be imagining?

Yes, I mean, bigger statues, you know, pushing towards a meter.

Wow.

Yeah.

So that's why, I mean, you know, they're much, and 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 Ginni Terracotta tradition.

So these are, you know, double, three times, four times the size of Gene 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 centimeters or in some cases larger.

And just so we know, Kevin, I mean, how far away is the Niger River to the Nock that we're talking about?

It's all, I mean, the Nock tradition is, if it straddles one river, it straddles the Baynu.

It doesn't straddle the Niger.

So maybe

100 kilometers, 200 kilometers away from the Niger River.

It's just asking potentially, you know, because I know it's a large areas, but potentially is there, you know, trade and contact between them.

So passing of pottery ideas there and back.

So yes, although the ones in the Niger River are bigger, could there have been contact and influence between the two well what's curious is archaeologically speaking there's not a very visible archaeological tradition prior to knock 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 Bronig team, you know, say that they're not finding anything earlier and that effectively this demonstrates that Nock 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 is making its way down with agricultural populations which are expanding at that at that time.

So these are people already back at 1500 BC, which is before they're producing any statues or before they're producing iron,

that, you know,

these are

food-producing,

farming,

agro-pastoral peoples coming down from the north.

settling 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 NOC 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 Knox's case, they can be both relatively flat disset-shaped beads, but they can also be tubular, which are much more complicated to make because you imagine you're having to, you know, they could 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, it's a it's a 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 here are 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 down.

And it's getting down in enough numbers that you can make these enormous necklaces out of it.

I mean,

this comes from the mortuary archaeology of 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, you know, 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 a substantial way and in quantity.

And then, of course, you have to ask, well, what is NOC 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, these days we look at

Africa and 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 have 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, you know, 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, wild game wipeout across West Africa.

You know, 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 muskets.

That's interesting, isn't it?

I hadn't thought of ivory at all when thinking about artifacts.

And also, you made an interesting point if we go back to the statues of how sometimes it sounds like it's not just the statues,

they have decorations on them too.

I mean, do we have many ivory artifacts as decoration from within the Not culture, or is this just a theory based on what we know about elephants in antiquity?

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.

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 Nock just because of the soil condition, 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 a 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, it was good to talk about trade as well, because you preempted a part of the chat, which was, you know, kind of the wider world that they lived in.

So thank you for highlighting that.

If we go back to the statues, the figurines, you've highlighted how many of them fragmented, very complex designs too.

But if we actually focus on the designs, what do they show?

What things do these terracottas show?

Well, the statues themselves are both anthropomorphic or depicting humans or human-like forms.

and they're also zoomorphic.

So, you know, 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

a fuller beard with a mustache 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, this is not.

I've never seen two that are quite alike.

So, 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, you know, 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 that the first archaeologist to work on the Noctur Carters 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 they...

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.

And that's also, you know, to explain why there's so many of them.

If every house has one, then that sort of, I mean,

in terms of the number of finds and the likelihood of finding such objects, much greater for NOC than, say, you know, the comparable terracotta tradition, which is the Jinnai terracotta tradition in Mali, or indeed other traditions in Niger and so on.

So, this is, of course, where this new research project in the 2000s really moved things along because it began excavating NOx sites and find spots in quantity.

And this is where it becomes clear that you have,

you know, these statues are fragmentary.

You say

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.

So, and again and again, not finding intact ones.

And, you know, 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, 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 Fang 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 and then in 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.

In North America, yeah.

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 Mande world, Myama.

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

the Sanufu areas that I'm familiar with, you know, 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 hearthstones, 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, you know, this is not, I'm not saying this is the same thing, but I'm saying it's a model of some reasons that, you know, 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.

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 pit.

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It's almost, I'm just trying to think of a parallel.

I think, isn't it an ancient Egyptian culture or ancient Kushite culture where sometimes they'll depict certain animals or in hieroglyph with a tomb, but usually they'll depict, if it's a ferocious animal like a crocodile or something like that, with some sort of injury or so not fully whole.

So they're not as dangerous as they would have otherwise been with that fear that I think is with the hieroglyphs as well that they have that kind of magical element that they could come out of the of the wall and actually become real things.

It feels almost a bit of a similar thing that you there's that worry about inanimate objects or things that the humans have made becoming real

in the afterlife and trying to prevent that from happening.

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 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 in them,

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 it's again, it's the same sort of thing that intact objects have power.

And so you break things to, you know, to drain the nyama out of them, as it were, to get rid of the spiritual power from these objects.

It also feels like maybe this is one that we can't answer yet, but I must, just before we go on to metals, is

given that there are so many of these terracottas created, and given that these people are living in small villages, do we think it's possible that almost part of their society was to learn to kind of create these objects or would there have been a specialized person you know who would have been involved in getting the clay, firehardening the clay, then making the terracotta or then firehardening it?

There were specific people who knew the craft, I guess, professionals, or that

everyone had to kind of learn how to make these?

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 the souls 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,

part of NOC is on the benu, although it doesn't run quite right to allow things to flow through the area.

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 Diya.

And in Diya, 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're a very typical wedding gift.

So, you know, if you're newly weds, they get jidagas, but they get jidagas from these people in Diya.

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've put like the people's names, and we need it delivered by this date.

And then every day, there would be pirogues 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 Nock.

And And we do, I mean, there is remarkably one knock terracotta of two people in a boat.

So

they are, you know, they definitely were using boats.

But, you know, you do think that people are commissioning these.

I mean, maybe, you know, 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 go down 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, it has to be at some point, it has to be broken.

This is just me hypothesizing that.

But it's very

interesting, nonetheless, and especially for such a mysterious culture.

I mean, Kevin, I could ask so much more about that, but as we're nearing the end, we've got to also talk about iron.

Because talk to me a bit about their expertise, their proficience with iron, and how they become blacksmiths.

Because this also seems a really important part of the Nock story, right?

So, if you're looking at Nock chronology,

so they're coming into the area with polished stone and napstone artifacts artifacts and 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.

So

and you know, also what's interesting is in terms of looking at the connections between the terracottas terracottas and the iron, recent excavations at Janjala find a fragmentary terracotta as an offering in each decommissioned iron furnace.

So just, you know, undermining 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.

There was, for a long time, one of the earliest African iron smelting sites was Turugo, 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 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 1,000, I think it's possible.

But it's, you know, I'm not one of the metallurgical specialists, and they tend to defend their ability to, you know, 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.

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.

But that's fine.

That is my prediction.

But so

whether, you know, 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 axes.

So for forest clearance, you know, for working wood and everything.

So, axes and adzes are being made out of iron, but also

bits of personal adornment, 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 tuyers, tuyers,

which are being used to control the process

and, you know, the atmosphere inside the chamber and so forth.

And a good number of intact furnace bases have been found.

So these are, you know, relatively small diameter furnaces, you know, maybe a meter, a meter twenty in diameter.

anywhere from 80 centimeters to a meter twenty.

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 is more broadly in Africa.

You might find a pot or 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.

I mean, if we look at much more historic situations, again, in the Mandae world, so particularly in Mali, and there's a great book by McNaughton on the Manday 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 Kala, those who shape Nyama.

And generally speaking, in the Manday world within blacksmith families, the men can make sort of magical earthen objects.

They also obviously do all the metal working 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 casted blacksmiths.

So, this is very, you know, early on, knock.

And as before, generally, people want to talk about there being castes 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.

Yes.

Do we know what happens to the knock culture?

They seem to last for quite a long time.

Do we know what follows them almost?

Well, this is what's peculiar because NOC just kind of fizzles between 300 BC and the first century AD

date-wise, and because

we tend to grade

the intensity of occupation on a 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 falloff in our numbers of radiocarbon dates after 300 BC.

They don't just go away entirely, but 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.

You know, there's this sort of peak intensity between 800 or at best 900 BC.

You might have the earliest terracottas by But, you know, more certainly from 800 BC, 300 BC is just, you know,

a cliff edge drop-off.

So something happens then.

You know, there are all sorts of things one can invoke.

You know, you could say there could be conflict, there could be environmental collapse.

I mean, 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 Ibouku, 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 900 900 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 glass making and extensive and very sophisticated glass making making, it ethe.

So, you know, 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,

you know, 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 been 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 in the early 20th century well kevin i mean this has been absolutely fantastic you have to come back on in the future to talk more about this area of the world and its extraordinary prehistory and thousands of years ago and the legacy it has on more recent cultures as well.

We've covered quite a lot of ground, but we've got to wrap it up there.

And it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come come on the podcast today very welcome it's been a pleasure

well there you go there was professor kevin macdonald introducing you to the extraordinary yet very mysterious knock culture of ancient nigeria i hope you enjoyed today's episode thank you for listening Please follow the ancients on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

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