ogundiran - four millennia of cultural history in nigeria

8/12/2019 Ogundiran - Four Millennia of Cultural History in Nigeria

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J World Prehist (2005) 19:133168DOI 10.1007/s10963-006-9003-y

ORIGINAL PAPER

Four Millennia of Cultural History in Nigeria(ca . 2000 B.C.A.D. 1900): Archaeological Perspectives

Akinwumi Ogundiran

Published online: 30 June 2006C Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. 2005

Abstract This essay is an analysis of archaeological contributions to the understanding of Nigerias cultural history between ca. 2000 B.C. and A.D. 1900 focusing on the followingthemes: the origins of food production; development and transformations in metallurgicaltraditions; the beginnings of social complexity; and the character of state formation andurbanism. The transformations in everyday material life as a result of the entanglement withthe Atlanticcommerce and ethnoarchaeologicalapproaches to understandingmaterial cultureand archaeological contexts also receive attention. The essay provides pathways to some of the turning points in Nigerias cultural history, shows the convergence and divergence of cultural historical developments in different parts of the country, and identies the criticalgaps in archaeological research agenda.

Keywords Late Stone Age . Agriculture . Pastoralism . Iron production . Socialcomplexity . Urbanization . Empire . Atlantic encounter . Ethnoarchaeology

Introduction

Since 1943 when B. E. B. Fagg conducted the rst systematic archaeological excavations ata Late Stone Age site in Central Nigeria (Fagg, 1944 ), archaeological research has followedmany pathways to enrich our understanding of Nigerias variegated cultural history in lalongue dur ee mode (Ogundiran, 2002a ). The diverse methodologies, theoretical frameworks,and intellectual traditions that have informed different archaeological investigations over thepast sixty years are brought together in this paper to shed light on about four thousand yearsof Nigerias cultural history. Nigerias cultural and ecological diversity and the resultantregional variations in the archaeological sequences tend to preclude comparisons of regionalcultural histories. I argue that despite the diversity of archaeological sequences in different

A. Ogundiran ( )Department of History, Florida International University,University Park,Miami, FL 33199, USAe-mail: [email protected]

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regions, there were convergences of cultural historical developments across Nigeria dueto a combination of common historical processes that these regions experienced since ca.2000 B.C. It is not only that agricultural societies expanded across Nigeria in the last twomillennia B.C., for example, but iron production commenced very early in more than two

centers between the seventh and fth centuries B.C. What is more, social complexity markedby the development of institutionalized hierarchies and large-scale sociopolitical formationsdeveloped simultaneously in different parts of Nigeria during the rst millennium A.D.Long-distance commercial networks of transcontinental and intercontinental dimensionscontributed to shaping the cultural historical trajectories in several localities after the eighthcentury A.D. These commercial networks were however grounded in local and small-scaleregional economic foundations that included the manufacture of utilitarian and prestigegoods.

I highlight the implications of the archaeological sequences in Nigeria for understandingthe cultural historical innovations in West African subcontinentduring the late Holocene. Thepaper is chronologically and thematically organized into ve sections, covering the periodfrom the last phase of the Late Stone Age (Later Stone Age) to the early years of colonialrule; including the emerging perspectives on pathways to food production; metallurgicaltraditions; social complexity, state formation, and urbanism; the consequences of Atlanticencounters, and ethnoarchaeology. Specic nds, chronology, methodology, and sites arementioned where appropriate but the primary focus is on the substantive relationships be-tween archaeological concepts and data on one hand, and interpretations and narratives onthe other. This allows us to draw out unresolved issues, neglected themes, and critical gapsin the research agenda, as groundwork for charting new courses in Nigerian archaeology.

Unless otherwise stated, all radiocarbon dates mentioned in the text are calibrated ages.

Overview of geography

The political boundaries of Nigeria are recent, a product of arbitrary demarcation throughEuropean colonial rule in the second half of the nineteenth century. The consequence is thatareas that belonged to the same cultural complex; involved in intimate networks of political,economic, and cultural interactions prior to 1861; or which belonged to the same pre-colonialpolitical umbrella were partitioned into different countries and now tend to be discussed in

isolation of one another. The emphasis here is on the areas that are within the boundaries of the modern state of Nigeria but references will be made, where necessary, to the adjacentregions that form a continuum with the cultural contexts in Nigeria (Fig. 1). The scale of archaeological research in Nigeria is uneven. The current archaeological map of the countryonly reects the areas of archaeological investigations. Most of the case studies in this essaycome from four geographical zones: the northeast (Lake Chad region), the Middle Belt(especially the Niger and Benue Valleys), the southwest (Yoruba-Edo cultural complex), andthe southeast (primarily Igboland). However, some mention will also be made of Hausalandin the central sudanic savanna where very tentative and sporadic archaeological research hasso far been carried out (Fig. 1).

With the most diverse ethnolinguistic groups and one of the most diverse ecologicalzones in Africa, Nigeria presents a complex geographical and cultural landscape. Its diverseecologies and climatic regimes have conditioned, if not determined, the cultural historicalmanifestations in different regions of the country. This ecological diversity is germane toany critical understanding of the character of innovations, changes, and continuities in thecultural history in the country. Today, six major climatic and vegetation zones are identiable,all arranged in parallel east-west bands between the Sahara Desert and the Atlantic Ocean

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Fig. 1 Nigeria: Major Sites and Cultural Areas

(Barbour et al. , 1982 ). These zones are the sahel; sudanic savanna (the sudan is the belt of open grassland savanna on the northern fringes of the equatorial forest); Guinea savanna;derived savanna (or, forest-savanna mosaic); rainforest; and the mangrove and deltaic swamp

(Fig. 2). These vegetation bands are for the most part a reection of the distribution of rainfallas determined by the interactions between two air masses: the cool humid southwesterlyAtlantic air and the dry northeast continental wind from across the Sahara (Sowunmi, 1981 ,p. 128).

The trends toward the current climatic and vegetational picture began during the thirdquarter of the Holocene, about 2,500 B.C. (Brooks, 1998 ; Brunk and Gronenborn, 2004 ;McIntosh, 2000 ). This period serves as the terminus a quo of this article because of the far-reaching impacts that the environmental changes have since had on cultural transformations,demographic and settlement changes, and socioeconomic innovations in Nigeria and acrossWesternAfrica. The latitudinal shifting of theenvironmental zones, especially theoscillationsbetween wet and drought conditions, created prime conditions for pulse migrations andcultural innovations in the past four thousand years. The beginning of the second millenniumB.C. was ushered in by higher aridity, onset of desertication throughout the Saharan andSahelian localities, increasing oscillations of the lake and playa shores, and shifting frontiersof rainfall isohyets (McIntosh, 2000 , p. 153). The increasing dry conditions continued in therst millennium B.C. The climatic conditions reached the level similar to the present-daysituation between ca. 600 and 400 B.C., but environmental conditions drier than at present

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Fig. 2 Nigeria: Vegetation Zones

prevailed between ca. 300 B.C. and A.D. 300. Precipitation increased by about A.D. 300and improved for the rest of the rst millennium A.D. This stable optimum precipitationwas superceded ca. A.D. 1100 by a drop in rainfall that lasted till ca. A.D. 1500. This dropshifted ecological zones southwards, signicantly affecting several hundred kilometers insome areas (Brooks, 1998 , p. 149). The period from ca. AD 1500 and 1630 was marked byan increase in rainfall with the consequent dependable and abundant harvests for farmers,and improved grazing areas for pastoralists (Brooks, 1998 , p. 152). However, a return to veryunpredictable climatic conditions, characterized by droughts and famines, prevailed from ca.1630 to 1860. The cultural, technological, economic, and sociopolitical transformations andprocesses that marked the archaeological sequences in Nigeria during the past four thousandyears have followed the contours of these climatic and ecological changes.

Later stone age transformations

The archaeological study of the last two millennia B.C., often referred as the Later StoneAge for convenience, has focused on four themes: regional variabilities in stone technology;innovations in food-sourcing strategies; migrations; and environmental history and humanadaptations to the unstable climatic regimes. In looking for evidence to answer questionson each of these themes, archaeologists have focused on the two habitation types that

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characterize theLater Stone Age(LSA) in Nigeria: rockshelters in thesavanna andrainforestsof central and southern Nigeria (e.g., Rop, Dutsen Kongba, Kagoro, Akpo, Iwo Eleru, ItaOgbolu, Ifetedo, and Mejiro in Old Oyo); and open-sites in the Sahelian and coastal regions,especially in the Chad Basin and Badagry (see Fig. 1; and Andah and Anozie, 1980 ; Alabi,

1998 ; Breunig et al. , 1996 ; Connah, 1981; Eyo, 1972 ; Fagg, 1972 ; Fatunsin, 1996 ; Oyelaran,1991 , 1998 ; Shaw and Daniels, 1984 ; Soper, 1965 ; Willett, 1960 ; York, 1978 ). Investigationsshow that pottery appears in most LSA sites between 5000 and 2000 BP in association withmicroliths, polished stone axes, and heavier tools such as cores and hammer stones, largestone blades, and grinding stones. The presence of microliths seems indicative of hunting,whereas the heavy tools have been interpreted as part of the tool kits for foraging and farming(Shaw and Daniels, 1984 ).

Research into the origins and development of agriculture has proceeded slowly due inpart to poor preservation of certain food plants such as yam in the savanna and rainforestbelts, and, until recently, inadequate application of otation or other plant recovery strate-gies during excavations. Another factor may be the preference in earlier research for rockshelter sites, which may represent only a seasonal sub-set of subsistence activities. A per-sistent disappointment, especially in the savanna and rainforest belts, has been the lack of domesticated plant remains in contexts where pottery, ground stones and axes have beenfound (Neumann, 2003, 2005 ). We should however note that evidence of domestication isnot necessarily synonymous with cultivation as the latter might have been practiced withoutresulting in domesticated plants. In fact, domesticated plants are an end result of a long-term manipulation of wild plants that may or may not include cultivation (Haaland, 1999 ,pp. 398399). In order to have a better understanding of the development and intensication

of agriculture in Nigeria, as in other parts of Africa south of the Sahara, we will have to jettison our bias towards domesticates in favor of studies that focus on complete plant as-semblages in a locality (Neumann, 2005, p. 265). But before this agenda can move forward,we will need to use better and rigorous methods of plant recovery from archaeological con-texts. Meanwhile, this essay will follow the current practice of using plant domesticates asevidence of agriculture. Archaeological, ethnobotanical, and palynological research demon-strates that food-producing practices followed different pathways according to the dictatesof ecological variations (Breunig and Neumann, 2002a ; Chikwendu and Okezie, 1989 ; Kleeet al. , 2000 ; Neumann, 1999; Sowunmi, 1999 ). The following will show the pathways in the

Sahelian and rainforest/savanna regions of Nigeria.

The Sahel: Emergence of food production in the Chad Basin

The most detailed information on the origins and transformations of agricultural commu-nities in Nigeria has come from the Chad Basin. Various interdisciplinary archaeologicalresearchers in the Basin have followed an ecological program in which variability in thearchaeological records is interpreted as consequences of uctuations in the climatic andenvironmental conditions (Breunig et al. , 1996 ; Connah, 1981). These studies have given usinformative insights into how the unstable dry climatic regime that set in between 2,500 and2,000 B.C. had signicant impact on population distribution, food-sourcing strategies, andsociopolitical development in the Chad Basin (Breunig, 2005 ) [All the dates reported in thissubsection derive from over 120 C14 dates obtained in the Chad Basin. The dates are cali-brated to 2-sigma range using CalPal, The K oln Radiocarbon Calibration and PalaeoclimateResearch Package, and OxCal v.2.18 with calibration curve INTCAL98.14C (see Breunig,2005 , p. 110; Brunk and Gronenborn, 2004 , p. 108).]

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During the early second millennium B.C., dry conditions led to a retreat of the Lake Chad,and forced the southern Saharan populations, mostly pastoralists, to migrate southwardsinto the more favorable Bama Deltaic area of the Chad Basin where, by 1800 B.C., theyestablished a culture that has been named Gajiganna (Breunig et al. , 1992 ). The Gajiganna

people produced pottery and made bifacially retouched arrow points similar only to theones found in southern Sahara. The thin occupation debris associated with these pioneeringGajiganna people show that they led a highly mobile life between 1800-1500 B.C. (Breunig,2005 ). The bones of domesticated animals cattle, sheep, and goat associated with theoccupation levels demonstrate that the Gajiganna were pastoralists. The lack of any trace of contemporary domesticated plant remains suggests thatpastoralism preceded cropcultivationin the Nigerian Chad Basin. This pattern has been documented elsewhere in Africa north of the equator (Marshall and Hildebrand, 2002 ).

Between 1500 and1000 B.C., however, the Gajiganna people established fairly permanenthamlets along the shores of Lake Chad (Breunig et al. , 1996 ). Plant cultivation seems tohave commenced in the Chad Basin in the late second millennium BC as indicated by thepresence of domesticated pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum) for the rst time, ca. 1200 B.C.,in Kursakata (Gronenborn, 1997 ; Klee et al. , 2000 ). Lack of any local wild prototype for pearl millet suggests that the process of domestication of pearl millet took place outsidethe Lake Chad region, possibly in the area between southwestern Sahara in Mauritaniaand the Nile Valley (Neumann, 2004, pp. 258259). The pastoralists-farmers of Gajigannadid not however only live off raising cattle, sheep and goat, and cultivating pearl millet.Fishing, gathering, and hunting also played important role in their food-sourcing strategies.In addition, wild sorghum and rice were well utilized in the Chad Basin during the second

millennium B.C. Meanwhile, while there is evidence at Elkido that sorghum was cultivatedduring the rst half of the rst millennium B.C. (Neumann, 2003), it is not certain whether theprolic occurrence of rice grains in all layers at Kursakata are of the two wild species ( Oryzabarthii and Oryza longistaminata ) presently found in the area or an early, domesticatedvariety of African rice, Oryza glaberrima (Gronenborn, 1996 , p. 43).

The continued aridity during the rst millennium B.C. made sedentary life extremelydifcult in the Bama Deltaic area of Lake Chad that had supported the Gajiganna popula-tions during the second millennium B.C. (Salzmann and Waller, 1998 ). Between 1000 and800 B.C., the settlement mounds in the Bama Deltaic region disappeared and were replaced

by sheets of ephemeral occupation sites, consisting of few potsherds and stone artifacts.While many people were forced out of the area, others adopted a mobile pastoral and for-aging lifestyle. About this time, the rki clay area in the southeastern Lake Chad Basin wasoccupied for the rst time. However, not all parts of the Bama area (western basin) were aban-doned (Breunig, 2005 , p. 118). In fact, by the middle of the millennium, Zilum may representthe rst fortied settlement in this increasingly dry zone (Magnavita and Magnavita, 2001 ).

Zilum is 60 km north of Maiduguri. At the peak of its occupation, it was about1213 hectares in size, with an estimated population of 17002500. The settlement lastedfrom about 600 to 400 B.C. (Magnavita, 2004 , p. 73). It seems that the agglomeration of pop-ulations in fortied settlements like Zilum represented a form of cultural and sociopoliticaladaptation to the intense aridity of the rst millennium B.C. The discrete concentrations of specic nds and features at Zilum indicate that the settlement was divided into residentialcorporate groups each pursuing different techno-economic specializations (Magnavita, 2004 ,p. 86). Hundreds of what are identied as grain storage pits serve as pointers to the intensi-cation of food storage aimed at coping with the unpredictable harvests. The constructionof defence/enclosure walls around the settlement also suggests the priority of communalsolidarity against outsiders.

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These sociocultural innovations could not, however, be sustained for long. Under thepressure of the arid conditions that prevailed between ca. 300 B.C. and A.D. 300 (Brooks,1998 , p. 147), Zilum and other fortied settlements were abandoned. Another consequenceof the intense dry condition in the Sahel was the development or expansion of regional trade

networks. The high proportion of exotic stone raw materials like int, hematite, or syenite,found both in the ephemeral sites and in the stoneless rki clay, southeast of the lake, notonly attest to the high mobility of the populations but that long-distance exchange networksdeveloped between the nomadic pastoralists and the sedentary populations in the regionduring the rst millennium B.C. (Breunig and Neumann, 2002b ).

Agricultural beginnings in the rainforest and savanna

Contrary to the more detailed picture of cultural historical sequence in the Chad Basin duringthe second and rst millennia B.C., the archaeological data for the contemporaneous periodin other parts of the country are spotty and sometimes tentative. In the rainforest/savannaregions, questions of migration and cultural adaptation to shifting climatic regimes havebeen secondary to preoccupation with the antiquity and cultural dynamics of yam and oilpalm cultivation. Yam and oil-rich fruits were probably among the earliest plants intensivelyexploited here. These plants naturally occur in the savanna/forest zones and are believed tohave formed the core of agricultural development in the region. Due to the lack of direct,datable evidence, because of the problem of preservation, the antiquity of yam cultivation inthe savanna/rainforest belts is not yet determined, but is considered most likely to predatethe second millennium B.C. (Andah, 1987 , Andah et al. , 1993 ; Posnansky, 1969). However,

studies of wild yam species closely related to the domesticated ones, Dioscorea latifolia and D. cayenensis , suggest that domestication probably occurred in the forest-savanna ecotone(Coursey, 1967 ). Heavy, parallel-sided aked stones and polished stone axes in the woodedsavanna and rainforest belts have been identied as evidence of digging tools for yamcultivation (Alabi, 2005 ). These could have been used alongside wooden implements withsharpenedpoints andedges for the cultivation andharvesting of yam(Chikwendu andOkezie,1989 ).

The abundant occurrence of charred endocarps of oil palm fruit in several LSA rockshelters, and the identication of pollen grains of oil palm in the Niger Delta and the Middle

Belt strongly indicate that the oil-rich fruits and seeds were important in the regionalsubsistence economy during the rst millennium B.C. (Sowunmi, 1999 , p. 201; also seeOyelaran, 1991 ). Palynological records in the Niger Delta show that the oil palm was a minor component of the vegetation from ca. 35,000 to 3,000 B.P. but that the pollens of oil palmand weeds sharply increased from ca. 2800 B.P. This assessment is based on ve radiocarbondates obtained from different levels in a 36 m deep core in the Niger Delta, and associatedwith pollen grains of oil palm (Sowunmi, 1981 , p. 460):

28.12 m level: > 35000 YBP (GU-1203)13.38 m level: 7575 130 YBP (GU-1204)2.50 m level: 700 90 YBP (GU-1208)1.90 m level: 720 70 YBP (GU-1209)0.50 m level: 535 60 YBP (GU-1207)

This increase in pollen is attributed by Sowunmi ( 1999 , pp. 206207) to deliberatecultivation and protection of palm trees in areas near stream valleys and in the drier fringesof the forest. Maley and Chepstow-Lusty (2001) have questioned this conclusion, arguing

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instead that the increase in the percentage of oil palm pollen in the early rst millenniumB.C. was a result of increasingly dry conditions and reduction in forest cover ca. 2800 and2400 B.P., a situation that allowed for wider dispersal of palm pollen. Even if this is the case,the persistent association of palm kernels with LSA artifacts in secured rockshelter sites

during the rst millennium B.C. [Apa (Badagry), Iffe-Ijumu, and Kariya Wuro (Alabi, 1998 ;Oyelaran, 1991 ; Sowunmi and Awosina, 1991 ), among others] suggests that the increasinglydry conditions necessitated changes in food-sourcing strategies that may have includedincrease in the use of oil palm. How these environmental changes affected the utilizationof palm fruits in southern and central Nigeria remain an unanswered question. Future workshould help us understand whether these LSA peoples were merely opportunistic foragerstaking advantage of the natural thinning of the forest and natural expansion of palm trees, or farmers who were protecting and cultivating palm tree groves.

Other directions in LSA studies

The agricultural innovations in the savanna and the rainforest belt seem wholly independentof the Saharan and Sahelian development. However, we are still in the dark on the kindsof interactions that developed between the agropastoralists of the Sahara-Sahelian belt andthe farmers and horticulturalists of the savanna-rainforest region. Future studies will shedmore light on how the arid conditions in the Sahel during the second and rst millenniaB.C. impacted the populations in the savanna-forest zone. We know that in the West Africansubcontinent, there were not only southward migrations from the Sahara during this period,

but peoples of the heavily wooded zone in the south also colonized lands to the north asthe studies in the Middle Niger Valley have shown (McIntosh, 2000 , p. 153). Comparativeregional archaeological investigations in Nigeria would be useful to understand the kinds of interregional relationships between the Sahelian populations and their southern neighbors,and the implications of the climatic uctuations in the fragile ecological niches of Sahelianbelt for the rainforest belt, and vice versa.

Historical linguistic studies based on the controversial methods of glottochronology andlexico-statistics led to a cautious suggestion that most language groups that dene the currentethnolinguistic groups in Nigeria developed between ca. 6000 and 2000 B.P. (Armstrong,

1964a , 1964b ). Indeed, this period witnessed dramatic expansion in ceramic-using LSA pop-ulations across Nigeria and West Africa as a whole (Andah, 1987; , Andah et al. , 1993 ). In1975, the late Professor Bassey Andah began an important archaeological and ethnoarchae-ological project to study the relationship between expansion of agricultural economy andethnolinguistic diversity during the last two millennia B.C. He and his students investigated,inter alia , the role of the Middle Benue Valley (MBV) in the origins of proto-Bantu in thegeneral area of the modern Nigeria-Cameroun borders (Andah, 1983a , 1983b , 1998 ; Andahet al. , 1981 ). The research at MBV, focusing on Tiv region in particular, produced evidenceof LSA populations in rockshelters but, in age, we know only that they predate ca. 500 B.C.(Folorunso, 2005 ; Ogundele, 1991a ). According to Folorunso ( 2005 , p. 182), archaeologicalresearch has yet to demonstrate that the valley was the Bantu ancestral homeland but itis not really clear the kinds of data the archaeologists working in the area are expectingfor the assessment of the MBV as a proto-Bantu homeland. Some of the answers to thequestion of the place of MBV in the origins of the Bantu-speaking peoples will likely comefrom systematic comparison of stylistic aspects of material culture, especially pottery, fromwell-dated contexts between the MBV LSA sites and the early Bantu or Bantu-related sitesin Central Africa.

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Table 1 Radiocarbon chronology of some of the early iron age sites

Site Date Lab. No Source

Taruga 2230 120 B.P I 1459 Calvocoressi and David,

19792390 140 B.P I 29602250 100 B.P I 34002042 126 B.P BM 5322269 116 B.P BM 5332541 104 B.P BM 9382488 84 B.P BM 9402541 104 B.P BM 9412291 123 B.P BM 942

Nok 2160 95 B.P I 4913 Calvocoressi and David,1979

Ran Ndoko 2020 75 B.P N 2585 Calvocoressi and David,1979

Rop Rock Shelter 1975 125 B.P I 406 Calvocoressi and David,1979

Opi 2305 90 B.P OXA-3201 Okafor and Phillips, 19922170 80 B.P OXA-26912080 90 B.P OXA-3200

Metallurgical traditions: Emerging perspectives

The clustering of early radiocarbon dates from iron smelting sites within eighth to fourthcenturies B.C in the area between the upper reaches of the rainforest belt in southeasternNigeria and in the Sahel in the northeast indicates that the second quarter of the rstmillennium B.C. heralded the development and spread of iron technology in Nigeria. Thesesites include Opi in Nsukka area of Igboland; Taruga, Samun Dukiya, and Katsina Alain the Nok Culture area; the Middle Benue Valley (Tiv), the Chad Basin, and the Mandaramountains (see Fig. 1; Folorunso, 2005 ; Fagg, 1972 ; Gronenborn, 1998 ; MacEachern, 1996a ;Okafor, 1992 , 2000 ; Okafor and Phillips, 1992 ; Tylecote, 1975b ; for similar early dates

from neighboring Cameroon and Niger Republic, see Holl, 2000 ; Woodhouse, 1998 ) (Table1). These early dates for iron production have placed Nigeria at the center of debateson the origins of iron technology in Africa (e.g, Andah, 1979 ; Tylecote, 1975a ). Whilemany archaeologists see these dates as evidence that iron technology most likely developedindependently in different parts of Africa (see many contributors in Bocoum, 2002 ; alsoChilds and Herbert, 2005 , p. 281), some would argue that there is yet no proof to supportsuch a claim (e.g., Killick, 2004 ; Killick et al. , 1988 ; Tylecote, 1975a ). In addition to theold wood problem in radiocarbon dating (Killick 1987 ), Killick ( 2004 , p. 105) has recentlydrawn attention to the attening of the calibration curve in the mid-rst millennium B.C.whereby calibrated ages can range between 300 and 500 calendar years.

The debate on how iron technology began in sub-Saharan Africa has now been narrowedto whether it developed independently in more than one place, or whether it was a resultof diffusion from the Phoenician trading posts in North Africa (Bocoum, 2002 ; Holl, 2000 ;Killick, 2004 ). More signicantly, lack of evidence of earlier copper smelting in Nigeriaand the controversial nature of some of the dates from copper-smelting sites in Niger haveraised doubts about the independent invention of iron technology in sub-Saharan Africa(Killick, 1987 ; Killick et al. , 1988 ; Posnanky and McIntosh, 1976 ; Tylecote, 1975a , 1982 ).

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Nevertheless, research in Mauritania and Niger still raises the possibility of copper smeltingas early as the second millennium B.C. (Holl, 2000 , p. 15). Indeed, the expectation thatthe mastery of copper smelting is a necessary precondition for iron manufacture seems toderive from the idea that the discovery of iron metallurgy was the ultimate consequence

of the use of iron ores as a ux to facilitate the separation of molten reduced copper fromcopper ores (McIntosh and McIntosh, 1983 , p. 241). However, as noted by Schmidt ( 1996 ,p. 8), there may be more than one pathway to iron metallurgy. A number of scholars havenoted the possibility that efcient re control derived from pottery production may have ledto the independent development of iron technology in more than one place (Andah, 1979 ;Woodhouse, 1998 , p. 179).

Nonetheless, the sheer diversity of iron-smelting techniques and furnaces in Nigeria (seeAdeniji, 1979; Anozie, 1979 ; Holl, 2000 ; Okafor, 1993 ; Schmidt, 1996 ; Tylecote, 1975b ),from the slag-tapping, forced-draft smelting furnaces at Opi to the low-shaft, forced-draft,non-slag-tapping furnaces at Taruga, suggests early innovations in iron technology and thepossibility of several origins between the eighth and fourth centuries B.C. Further, althoughthere is now rm proof of Phoenician iron working at Carthage and in the Iberian Peninsulaby at least the eighth century BC, the smelting furnaces and tuy eres are different from thoseknown in sub-Saharan Africa (Killick, 2004 , p. 107). Perhaps it would be more fruitful toconceptualize the development of early iron metallurgy in Nigeria and elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa as a mosaic process in which initial independent local experimentationsand inventions later beneted from the circulation of intercontinental and transcontinentalinnovations.

The question of origins requires more high-quality data: systematic documentation and

excavation of newly discovered iron-smelting sites, the dating of furnaces and smeltingresidues, and better description of the various methods of iron working. The over sixty iron-smelting furnaces, furnace bases, and heaps of iron slag discovered at Ampara, Delimiri,and Shaushau; the 2-km 2 complex with over thirty furnaces documented at Ibila-Alukpo,and the numerous iron smelting furnaces in southern Zaria, all in central Nigeria, may proveimportant in shedding more light on the age and origins of ironworking in West Africa(Aremu, 1999 , 2005 ). Placing these smelting sites in the context of their settlement systemswill be useful for understanding the relationship between ironworking and the developmentof sociopolitical complexity, social differentiation, and craft specialization, among others

(see Childs and Herbert, 2005 , p. 294).Many of the recent archaeological investigations on metallurgy have focused on therelationship between iron and stone technologies. It is now clear that the advent of iron didnot mark a sharp break with the stone-using technology. Rather, stone tools continued tobe used, although in reduced number, parallel to iron tools. In fact, ground stone axes andmicrolithic tools constituted a major component of the agricultural, foraging, and huntingtool kit until about A.D. 500 even among the early iron users (e.g., Connah, 1981, p. 155).Thus, there was not a fundamental change in technology between ca. 500 B.C. and A.D. 500when iron production began.

Attention has also been placed on the methods of iron production in different locationsincluding the methods of iron ore prospecting, ore preparation, smelting, and smithing (e.g.,Akinade, 2003 ; Jemkur, 1989; Okafor, 1993 , 1995 ; Sutton, 1976 ); types and characteris-tics of furnaces (Anozie, 1979 ); documentation of iron-smelting sites (Aremu, 1999 ); andimpacts of iron technology on cultural and social processes including labor and sociopo-litical organization, socioeconomic networks, as well as local and regional trade (Davidand Sterner, 1996 ). Morphological and microscopic analyses of residues and slag from ironsmelting furnaces have been very informative in the study of change and continuity in the

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technology of iron production in southeast Nigeria (e.g., Okafor, 1993 ). Edwin Okafor hasdocumented that in the fth century B.C. in Opi area, and fourteenth century A.D. in thearea of Owerre-Elu (both in Igboland), the smelting of iron was conducted in variousforms of slag-tapping, forced draught shaft furnace but by the eighteenth century A.D. in

Umundu-Orba area of Igboland, self-draught furnaces were used in which the slag was nottapped as smelting progressed (Okafor, 1993 , pp. 437-439). The study of other metals, es-pecially copper and its alloys, are usually in relation to the study of social complexity, socialdistinction, long-distance trade, and ethnoarchaeology of metal technology (e.g., Aremu,1990a , 1998 ; Chikwendu and Umeji, 1979 ; Chikwendu et al. , 1989 ; Shaw, 1970 ; Willett,1977 ) (see below). One theme that has received much less interest is the belief and cognitivesystems associated with iron production, and how these systems affected social relationsacross gender, age, and social ranks (e.g., Childs and Killick, 1993; Schmidt, 1996 ).

Social complexity: Foundation and consolidation

Complex societies, dened by the emergence of hierarchical institutions and elaborationin elite material culture, began to emerge during the last quarter of the rst millenniumA.D. Local and regional networks of complex societies rapidly expanded across Nigeriabetween ca. A.D. 1000 and 1500. The archaeology of social complexity in Nigeria hasfocused on elite sites, and on features and materials that dene the characteristics of socialcomplexity. The existing data, for the most part, tell us about the character, not the origins andprocesses of social complexity. Archaeological data are generally weak on the foundations of

social complexity during the rst millennium A.D. Historical sources, mostly oral traditions,indicate that parallel but similar developments accounted for the emergence of dynastic,state-level political formations in the Yoruba-Edo area, Hausaland, and the Chad Basin inthe fourth quarter of the rst millennium A.D. (see contributions in Ikime, 1985 ). The oraltraditions tend to privilege migrations, intergroup relations, factional conicts, and expansionof regional commerce as the main engines of social complexity and state formation. Thesetraditions are useful not only for identifying archaeological sites, generating hypotheses, andformulating research designs amenable to archaeological investigations, but they offer anopportunity for a truly interdisciplinary humanistic account of the advent and transformationsof social complexity.

Although trade of trans-continental proportions played crucial roles in the structure andtrajectories of the several complex societies that developed in West Africa after the eighthcentury A.D., the evidence of foreign trade, such as beads and copper-alloy artifacts, cannotby itself explain the origins of social complexity. It appears the key to the rise of complexsocieties lay in the elite control of local resources, including ritual knowledge (e.g., in Igbo-Ukwu, see below). The surpluses derived from the manipulation of these local resources werethen diverted to procure exotic goods, which served to accentuate and perpetuate the elitepower and social stratication. How domestic economy and local power structure enabledand shaped long-distance commerce and social differentiation is a critical area for future

research. So much emphasis has been placed on foreign trade that the domestic economy the essential ingredient of social complexity is often ignored. The rest of this sectionwill be devoted to a region-by-region assessment of the evidence of foundations of socialcomplexity, between A.D. 800 and 1500, and the subsequent transformations between A.D.1500 and 1900. The latter period witnessed an increase in the number of sociopoliticalformations, an intense spirit of political centralization, consolidation of imperial ambitions,and diffuse regional interaction networks.

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The central Sudan: The chad basin and hausaland

Research into the rst millennium A.D. shows that iron-bearing settlement mounds, repre-senting villages, rapidly increased in the valleys of River Niger and its tributaries (e.g., Yelwa

and Wushishi), southern Hausaland, and the plains of the Chad Basin after the sixth cen-tury A.D. (Connah, 1981, pp. 201213; Shaw, 1976 ; Sutton, 1976 ). Over 250 iron-bearingsettlement mounds have been identied on the Nigerian side of the Chad Basin alone, sev-eral of which had origins in the Late Stone Age, some dating to ca. 2000 B.C. (Holl, 1993 ,p. 337). A number of these mounds have been the focus of investigations into the character of continuities between the LSA and the iron-using communities. Excavations in the NigerianChad Basin suggest that although large village settlements were present by 500 B.C., therewas little evidence for site hierarchies in the region until the mid-rst millennium A.D.

How these site hierarchies culminated in the rise of Kanem, the oldest known state inthe central sudan and well referenced in the Arabic writings, is not yet understood. BothArabic and oral sources suggest that Kanem developed out of factional conicts amongpeer-polities in the northern Chad Basin (in the modern Chad Republic) around the ninthcentury A.D. Archaeology has not illuminated the development and character of this earlystate partly because of the nature of the evidence (see accounts in Gronenborn, 2001 ). First,the boundaries of the polity were uid just as the capital and the seat of its Mai (kings) shiftedfrom time to time; and the perishable nature of the house structures meant that the locationsof the early capitals are elusive to us (Gronenborn, 1998 , 2001 ; also see Bivar and Shinnie,1962 ). Second, the adoption of Islam by the Kanembu rulers ca. A.D. 1080s (Lavers, 1980 )implies that the kinds of durable sculptures that were associated with the royal court art in

Igbo-Ukwu and Ile-Ife during the same period (see below) are not likely to have existed. For now, the Arabic and oral sources only paint in broad strokes the political dynamics of therise of Kanem polity as the dominant power in the Chad Basin ca. A.D. 800. The tentativescenario is that the struggle over the control of prime land and northward trade routes amongthe small polities and groups in Zaghawa, a region between modern Chad Republic andsudanic savanna, intensied in the eighth century in the northern Chad Basin. Out of thesepeer-polity competitions arose a single powerful state of the Kanembu between the ninth andeleventh centuries (Ehret, 2003 , p. 48).

Some insights into the foundations of social differentiation that eventually culminated in

the segmentation of the basin into a mosaic of unequal and competing polities have comefrom southern Chad Basin at Aissa Dugj e in northern Cameroon, adjacent to Nigeria. Theearliest horse/pony remains at Aissa Dugj e were directly dated to 1310 60 B.P. (TO-7515;MacEachern, 2001 , p. 64). Their occurrence in an atmosphere of weakly developed socialhierarchies suggests that the possession of horses/ponies were markers of social prestigeand elite status by the seventh century A.D. rather than as evidence of hegemonic politicalpower (MacEachern, 2001 ). However, horses/ponies became instruments of conquest andstate hegemonic control by the end of the rst millennium A.D. as state-level sociopoliticalorganization developed. Despite the evidence of differentiated political elites in northeastNigeria and the adjacent northern Cameroon by the mid-rst millennium A.D., most of theChad Basin with the exception of Daima, Mdaga, and other areas closer to the lake were notreally integrated into long-distance trade until ca. 1200 A.D. (MacEachern, 2001 , p. 135).

Smaller polities developed in the shadow of the expanding Kanem in the rst half of thesecond millennium A.D., and some of them were later incorporated into the state. In thesouthern Chadic plain, between the plains of Bornu to the Logone River, and south to theMandara Mountains and Bui Plateau (in both Nigeria and Cameroon), polities arose andincreased in number by AD 1200. Some rose as little imitators of the Kanem state, but

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the rise of most was in response to the external threats posed by Kanem and other largepolities. The distinctive characteristics of these southern Chad Basin polities are that their capitals were walled settlements and they also had extensive graveyards. Such townshipsincluded Kabe, Kala-Kafra, Maltam, Kala-Maloue, Logone-Birni, and Ngala. They buried

their dead in jars and the grave goods that accompanied the burial of the elites includedcarnelian and glass beads and alloyed copper artifacts (Holl, 1996 , p. 590). The increasein the frequency of these items indicates intensication in external trading activities by theearly thirteenth century. The presence of warfare- and horsemanship-related artifacts in thegraves also demonstrate that the political elite of the southern Chad Basin were not onlyentrepreneurs but they also actively engaged in warfare. In fact, it was from the latter thattheir high status was primarily derived (Gronenborn, 1998 ; Holl, 1996 ).

Kanem-Bornu and transformations in the Southern Chad Basin, A.D. 15001800

The southward relocation of the capital of the troubled and aging Kanembu polity to BirniGazargamo in 1472 transformed Bornu into the center of imperial activities in the basin.Between ca. 1500 and 1900, Bornus imperial interests reshaped sociopolitical dynamicsthroughout the Chad Basin. In the southern plains of the basin, for example, archaeologistshave discovered that the region witnessed important changes in the balance of power between1500 and1600. Theexcavations conductedby Augustin Holl at Houlouf, northern Cameroon,have implications for understanding the sociopolitical processes taking place in the adjacentnortheastern Nigeria during this period. The stratigraphic sequence shows that many partsof the Central Chadic plain of northeastern Nigeria and northern Cameroon were abandoned

between ca. AD 1350 and 1450 due to dry climatic conditions but reoccupation commencedin the second half of the fteenth century with the advent of favorable climatic conditions.In the sixteenth century, Bornu initiated a vigorous program of expansion and conquest intothe southern Chadic plains. During the same period, Arab pastoralists moved into the area,encroaching on the agricultural land, and coming into conict with the autochtonous farmers.Likewise, the plain was plagued by competition among the new and old polities.

Holl discovered that in the face of external threat and intra-regional competition, thepeoples of the southern Chadic plain intensied the building and maintenance of earthenramparts to ward off border encroachments and they developed cemeteries for the formal

disposal of their dead (Holl, 1996 , p. 590). This latter practice is seen as evidence of mobilization of ideological symbolic practices to demonstrate the autochtones rootednessin the land. The Houlouf cemeteries gave several clues to the nature of changes in the Chadicsociopolitical organization during the sixteenth century, when ranked and hierarchical socialstructure intensied. Only a fraction of the population was buried in the cemeteries, andthese were mainly the elite (Holl, 1994 , p. 168). Similar processes were likely taking placeon the Nigerian side of the southern Chadic plain during this period. These symbolic burialpractices and defense strategies did not however halt the southern thrust of Bornu expansion.Several southern Chad Basin polities collapsed, and mound settlements disappeared betweenA.D. 1500 and 1800 on the Nigerian side. They collapsed mainly because of the increasedslaving activities initiated by Bornu and their agent-polities, such as Wandala (MacEachern,2001 , p. 142). Many groups retreated into the impenetrable area of southern Lake Chad anddeveloped defensive systems that ranged from settlement on mountain ranges, [for example,the Mandara highlands in Nigeria and Cameroon (MacEachern, 2001 )], to seeking refuge incaverns, caves, and rockshelters. They also built defense systems with plants and stones. Intheir impregnable new homes, they protected both themselves and their deities from Bornuimperialism and slaving (Bah, 2003 ; Gronenborn, 2001 ).

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The Bornu imperial activities, led by the Kanuri from the capital, also had consequencesfor the ethnic identities of the indigenous Kotoko populations in the southern Chadic plains.Gronenborn and Magnavita ( 2000 ) have shown a gradual correlation between the Bornuimperial expansion and migration of the Kanuri frontiersmen on one hand and changes

in ethnicity and ceramic traditions in the plains between the sixteenth and early twentiethcentury (Gronenborn and Magnavita, 2000 , p. 65). Although the Kotoko groups and politiesstruggled to maintain their own ceramic traditions in the face of Kanuri imperial rule,by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century several Kotoko groups had adopted thediagnostic elements of Kanuri pottery tradition from the Bornu area: a combination of redcoating, twisted strip roulette, and sgrafto.

The increasing scale of Bornu imperial power also stimulated the development of industrial-scale iron production at the southern peripheries of the empire (David, 1996 ;David and Sterner, 1996 ). The escalating demands for weapons, horse paraphernalia, andprotective gear by (the) . . . cavalry states of Bornu, Baghirmi, and Waday intensied ironproduction in the Mandara region (on the Nigeria/Cameroon border) (David and Sterner,1996 ; Stahl, 2004 , p. 153). Sukur was a Mandara polity that specialized in iron productionfor external trade. As iron production became the mainstay of its economy, it increas-ingly depended on its neighbors for agricultural produce. (David, 1996 ; David and Sterner,1996 ). Sukur represents a rare case of classless industrial society. The procuring of ore andcharcoal, and smelting activities were organized on familial basis, with mens labor con-centrating on smelting and the womens labor on collecting raw materials. This non-capitalintensive production system obviated the institution of wage labor and slavery and therewas no social stratication, despite Sukurs connection to the intensive merchant capital

economy of the Lake Chad and Saharan regions. The organization of intensive iron produc-tion within an egalitarian society at Sukur cautions against the frequent assumption that thearchaeological remains of large-scale iron slag are necessarily a product of stratied labor organization.

Hausaland

West of the Chad Basin, the early trajectories of sociopolitical development in Hausaland

are archaeologically almost unknown. Glimpses from oral traditions and linguistic studiessuggest that the Niger-Congo speaking Mbau groups, skilled in ironworking and involved inhunting and herding, held sway over Hausaland, ca. A.D. 300700. By the eighth centuryA.D., however, Chadicspeakers, whowere cattlepastoralists andshers,beganto expand intothe Mbau landscape, and initiated new forms of interactions that would dene sociopoliticalcomplexity in Hausaland during the subsequent centuries. Towards the end of the rstmillennium A.D., trade in iron, salt, andother commodities developedor drastically expandedbetween Hausaland and the Nilo-Saharan Zaghawa populations in the Lake Chad region(Last, 1985 , p. 175). The Chadic speakers seem to be the source of sacred dynastic kingsand state formation in Hausaland between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. In Kano,the sociopolitical transformation between the twelfth and fourteenth century led to a changein the conguration of settlement patterns, from dispersed interdependent settlements tonucleated urban centers with perimeter walls (Last, 1979 ). Archaeologists have not yetseriously addressed how intergroup relations between immigrants and autochthonous groups,and the expansion of regional commerce shaped the sociopolitical transformations thatheralded the rise of large-scale polities in Hausaland between the eleventh and fourteenthcenturies.

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Igbo-Ukwu in Igbo cultural history

The archaeology of social complexity in southeast Nigeria has focused on Igbo-Ukwu whereone of the most spectacular archaeological nds in Nigeria was made in the 1960s. Three

adjacent Igbo-Ukwu sites Igbo Richard, Igbo Isaiah, and Igbo Jonah, representing a grave,a shrine, and a storage pit respectively revealed a high level of craftsmanship in copper and bronze sculptures and ornamental pottery (Shaw, 1970 ). The grave consisted of a high-ranking man buried in sitting position with ve other individuals, two of whom were wearingcopper bracelets. Among the artifacts from the three sites were about 165,000 beads (mostlyglass), ivory tusks, ornately decorated bronze and ceramic objects. Four radiocarbon datesfell in the ninth century A.D., and one in the fteenth century:

A.D. 850 120 (on wood in the burial chamber);

A.D. 840 110; (four on charcoal from the shrine and storage pit)A.D. 840 145;A.D. 875 30;A.D. 1445 70.

Three other dates from the sites are in the tenth, eleventh, and thirteenth centuries.However, their large standard errors, between 240 and 300 years, limit their usefulnesscompared with the ninth century dates (McIntosh and McIntosh, 1986 , p. 433).

The Igbo-Ukwu evidence shows that wealth was concentrated in the hands of one or a few individuals. Since British colonial ethnography had originally described the Igbo

people as far below the evolutionary stage of a state (Ottenberg 1971 ), the materials at Igbo-Ukwu were initially considered aberrant, isolated, and unusual cultural achievements for theregion (Shaw, 1970 ). However, in the last twenty years, the forms and styles of Igbo-Ukwubronzes and ceramics have been found not only in other parts of Igboland, but also in theneighboring Ekoi-Ibibio area in the Cross River Valley (Anozie, 1993 ; Ibeanu, 1989 ; Eyo,2000 ). Further, archaeometallurgical analyses have demonstrated that the raw materials for the Igbo-Ukwu bronzes were locally sourced and that the bronze objects were not of externalorigins (Chikwendu et al. , 1989 ; Craddock, 1985 ; Chikwendu and Umeji, 1979 ).

The regional distributions of artifacts of the Igbo-Ukwu styles have been the primary way

of establishing that the Igbo-Ukwu artifacts derived their inspirations from the Igbo symbolicand stylistic reservoir (Anozie, 1993 ). The appliqu e, concentric, spiral, andgeometricpatternsthat characterize the Igbo-Ukwu pottery have been found at Ugwuagu Site 2 in Akpodated to about A.D. 670, indicating that the decorative grammar on Igbo-Ukwu potterywas established at least two centuries earlier in Akpo. Igbo-Ukwu pottery styles have alsobeen identied in undated contexts at Inyi, Ishiagu, and Nrobu Ehandiagu (Ibeanu, 1989 ).Decorative motifs on pottery and copper/bronze artifacts similar to those from Igbo-Isaiahhave been found at Otoogwe and Ogwugwu Agu sites, both about 3 km. west of Igbo-Ukwu.Moreover, the grave of an elite man associated with a spiral bronze pendant and a terracottahuman head similar to the burial at Igbo Richard has been identied at Onyoma in the Niger Delta. The site is dated to the thirteenth century, about three centuries later than the earliestdates from Igbo-Ukwu (Anozie, 1993 ). Thus, rather than belonging to an intrusive culturefrom a northerly direction (Shaw, 1970 , p. 27), we have both precedents and successorsfor the Igbo-Ukwu nds in terms of cultural context, cognitive and symbolic style, anddecorative grammar. Metallurgical analyses show that the copper and lead ores used inIgbo-Ukwu bronzes and copper artifacts were mined about 100 km. to the east at Abakaliki,Ishiagu, Enyingba, and Ameri. These sources of ore possibly extended to the Benue trough

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and the north-central plateau of Nigeria. These analyses essentially end speculations thatthe raw materials were transported from the Saharan edge or from the Mediterranean world(Chikwendu, 1998 ).

These latest studies do not deny that Igboland was indeed connected to a wider interaction

sphere through long-distance trade, but they demonstrate the intense local contexts thatsustained the cultural developments and commercial networks at Igbo-Ukwu and other related sites between the ninth and fteenth centuries. Some of the glass beads at Igbo-Ukwu are believed to be of Mediterranean origin, indicating that Igboland was part of thetranscontinental trading networks most likely via the Nile Valley (Insoll and Shaw, 1997 ;Robertshaw et al. , 2003 ). Sutton ( 1991 ) has suggested that the trading routes passing throughthe Islamic and Christian states of Nubia, the Lake Chad Basin (Kanem area), and through theNiger-Benue Valley, linked Igboland and the Nile Valley/Mediterranean world. The tradingroutes that linked the Igbo hinterland and the central sudan, especially the Chad Basin,deserve archaeological investigations. If by the ninth century A.D., as four radiocarbon datesfrom Igbo-Ukwu show, the Chad Basin was already a carrier of long-distance trade to theupper reaches of the rainforest belt in Igboland and to the Nile Valley, this means that welldeveloped commercial institutions were already established in the Lake Chad region beforethe emergence of the Kanem polity and its Saifuwa dynasty in the ninth century.

What was the sociopolitical organization that facilitated the transcontinental trading andindividual accumulation of wealth so early in Igboland? Historical ethnography indicatesthat Igbo-Ukwu ourished under the patronage of the Eze Nri institution. The rump of thispriest-king institution and ofce survives today in Oreri and Aguku areas of Igboland, afew kilometers from Igbo-Ukwu, although the contemporary ofce holders do not enjoy

the kind of power that would have concentrated so much wealth in the hands of a singleperson (Onwujeogwu 1981 ). The nds at Igbo-Ukwu suggest that the Eze Nri institutionand its agents were involved in long-distance commerce and that the wealth that theyacquired from their local ritual and political activities was used to nance the acquisition of sumptuary goods, especially Indian and Venetian beads, textiles, and horses in exchange for exports such as ivory, possibly kolanut, and other undetermined products that might haveincluded slaves, iron, and copper artifacts. The ofcers of Eze Nri also used their wealthand status as ritual specialists to recruit and maintain numerous miners, craftsmen, andartists among others. The Igbo-Ukwu nds not only challenge the ahistorical projections of

acephalous political systems on most parts of Igboland (Ottenberg, 1971 , pp. 307313), butthey also weaken evolutionary assumptions about social complexity. Rather than seeking tot Igbo-Ukwu into an evolutionary typology chiefdom or kingdom (see McIntosh 1999 ,pp. 912), we would better see the Igbo society as most probably a mosaic of different typesof sociopolitical organization.

The interpretation of thesymbolic and iconographic references in Igbo-Ukwucopper alloyand ceramic objects has helped to establish the local historical conditions that shaped theforms and disposition of the objects, and their contextual meanings in relation to the natureof the social complexity that developed in Igboland (Ray, 1987 ). The materials underscorethe importance of ritual in the development and maintenance of social complexity there.It has been argued that the pervasive ritual icons in the Igbo-Ukwu material served toproject aspects of the pivotal role of the priest-king within Nri Igbo life and thought (Ray,1987 , p. 77). The combination of fear, belief, supernatural sanctions, and nes that typicallyaccompany ritual seem to have been an integral part of securing compliant behavior andresolving disputes in the foundations of sociopolitical development in Igboland ( McIntosh,1999 , p. 12). To this end, iconic signs and metaphors were deployed to institute an hegemonicideology of social differences and hierarchies in the region.

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Yoruba-Edo region

The increasing scale of social organization across the different regions in the late rst andearly second millennia A.D. was physically marked on the rainforest belt of southwest

Nigeria by embankments that demarcate settlement boundaries. In the Esan and Beninareas (Fig. 1), Darling ( 1984 ) has mapped an intricate network of over 16,000 km. of embankments, enclosing more than 500 interconnected settlements and a total of 6500 km 2 .On the basis of poorly referenced radiocarbon dates (uncalibrated), Darling has proposedthat the earthworks were a continuing project that began in the mid-rst millennium A.D.as slash-and-burn farmers increased in number and commenced their southward expansionfrom the upper reaches of the rainforest belt. However, it seems that most of the constructionwas carried out between ca. A.D. 800 and 1500, when the embankments and the associatedditches became larger and deeper as settlements grew in size and sociopolitical formationsbecame more complex (Darling, 1997 ). Similar earthworks occur at Sungbo Eredo, in theIjebu area of Yorubaland, where a network of 160 km. of ramparts has been surveyed. Theyencircle an area of 40 35 km, with walls up to 10 m in some places. Darling has reportedthat charcoal, believed to be from res set to clear the bush before construction, give a dateof ca. A.D. 800 (Pearce, 1999 , p. 11); however, details of the radiocarbon date are not yetavailable.

The Benin-Esan earthworks have the potential to offer useful perspectives on the historyof sociopolitical formation in the rainforest belt when the details of their construction havebeen worked out. We also need systematic surveys of the rainforest (difcult as this may be)to determine how widespread embankments were between ca. A.D. 500 and 1000. Study of

the associated settlements will help us to understand the daily lives of the rampart-builders.It appears that the walled villages began to coalesce into large polities, with institutional-ized hierarchies, social differentiation and socioeconomic specializations, between ca. A.D.800 and 1200, although the causes are not yet clear. Nevertheless, the best example of thisdevelopment is the city-state of Ile-Ife. Discussions of early social complexity in southwestNigeria have mostly centered on Ile-Ife (e.g., Akinjogbin, 1992 ; Akinjogbin and Ayandele,1980 ; Ogundiran, 2003 ), because it is where we nd the earliest and most elaborate in-dices of social complexity, especially life-size naturalistic sculptures in brass and terracotta,representing a wide array of personalities, both elite and commoners (Willett, 1967 , 2004 ).

Ile-Ife: A city-state in regional context

The rise of Ile-Ife as a major city-state in the Yoruba region of southwest Nigeria wascontemporaneous with the rise of Kanem and Igbo-Ukwu. Here, an urban-based polityemerged in the upper reaches of the rainforest belt sometime between the ninth and eleventhcenturies A.D., although its foundations seem to lie in the sixth century (for a list of thecalibrated radiocarbon dates from Ile-Ife, see Ogundiran, 2003 , pp. 5255 and Willett, 2004 ).Since most of the excavations at Ile-Ife were rescue operations to save the accidentallydiscovered sculptures, archaeologists have emphasized the morphology and styles of theterracotta and bronze/brass sculptures, rather than broad settlement history and socioculturalsetting of those who produced the artworks (e.g, Eyo, 1974a ; Ogunfolakan, 2001 ; Willett,1967 , 2004 ; Shaw, 1978 ).

Ile-Ife has the richest oral traditions in the region concerning its development partlybecause the dynastic institutions established at the close of the rst millennium A.D. stillsurvive (Akinjogbin, 1992 ). These oral traditions, in combination with material culture, havebeen used to reconstruct the process of state formation in Ile-Ife (e.g., Obayemi, 1985 ;

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Ogundiran, 2003 ). There has also been a healthy focus on the cultural, economic, andsociopolitical aspects of Ile-Ife, and the regional contexts in which they functioned betweenca. A.D. 1000 and 1400 (Garlake, 1974 , 1977 ; Eyo, 1974b ). These studies have culminatedin a cultural historical synthesis linking developments at Ile-Ife to those in the other parts of

Yoruba-Edo region (Ogundiran, 2002b , 2003 ).The phenomenal elaboration of material culture in the rst four centuries of the second

millennium A.D. have been identied as the watershed in the cultural orescence of Ile-Ife(Eyo, 1974b ; Garlake, 1974 , 1977 ; Willett, 1973 ), prompting Willett ( 1967 , 1973 ) to callit the Classical era. I have elsewhere proposed that the Classical period can be subdividedinto two phases: A.D. 10001200 and A.D. 12001400 (Ogundiran, 2001 , 2003 ). The earlier phase was characterized by the construction of concentric walls that dened the new urbanlandscape (Ozanne, 1969 ); the orescence of art in durable media, such as copper alloys,terracotta, and granite stones, much of which serviced the royal court and the religious cults(Willett, 1967 ); the setting up of large-scale production of glass beads about 1.6 km. fromthe center of the city (Ajetunmobi, 1989 ; Eluyemi, 1987 ); the construction of large-scaleimpluvium houses (houses with an open central courtyard) and extensive potsherd and stonepavements around the city (Agbaje-Williams, 2001 ; Garlake, 1975, 1977 ; Ogunfolakan,1994 ); and the elaboration of iconography and rituals (Eyo, 1974a , 1974b ). Sacred kingshipwas fully developed during this period. Human sacrice either began or increased duringthe eleventh century A.D., sometimes accompanying the elite burials or associated withstate rituals. Mortuary goods, such as glass and carnelian beads, copper alloy sculptures andadornment, indicate the orientation of the elite towards external commerce (Garlake, 1974 ,p. 122). The Classical period fell within a period when regional commercial networks in West

Africa were ultimately linked to the trans-Saharan trade (Posnansky, 1973). It is difcult atthis point to assess what role the northern trade played in the sociopolitical transformationsat Ile-Ife between ca. A.D. 800 and 1200. It is likely that the crystallization of a system of dynastic kingship stimulated the need of the elite for exotic and prestige goods, leading tothe establishment of sustained (if punctuated) economic relations with the sudanic peoplesby the eleventh century.

The regional impacts of Ile-Ife on the development of social complexity, especially theadoption of divine kingship, in the savanna and rainforest belts are far better understood thanthe processes of its own development. Recent archaeological studies in southwest Nigeria

were aimed at accounting for the patterns of contacts and cultural historical relationships thatculminated in the proliferation of Ife ceramics and iconographies after the thirteenth centuryin Yoruba-Edo region (Ogundiran, 2001 , 2003 ; also see Eyo, 1974b ). The occurrence of the Ife ceramic stylistic grammar in different parts of the Yoruba-Edo region, starting abouttwo centuries after they rst appeared in Ile-Ife, suggests the primacy of Ile-Ife in regionalinteractions between A.D. 1000 and 1500. The diagnostic decorative motifs of the Ife ceramicsphere include applied bosses, cordons, keloid forms, cowry-form motifs; hyphenated cross-hatched incisions; stamped geometric-shape impressions, circular stylus motifs; reliefs of guilloche and rosette designs; rustication; and red-on-rims/lips. The diagnostic value of thesemotifs for mapping regional cultural-historical relationship is enhanced by the fact that theyare associated not only with pottery but also with the Classical terracotta sculptures at Ile-Ife(Ogundiran, 2001 ).

A combination of conceptual frameworks adapted from Kopytoffs frontier model (1987) ,Caldwells interaction sphere concept (1964) , Wallersteins world systems theory (1974) , andthe various oral interpretive models has been used to understand the trajectories of sociopo-litical development and archaeological sequences in the Yoruba-Edo region. Intersocietalnetworks (regional economic, political, and ritual interactions) played important roles in

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the structural reproduction of the sociopolitical, ideological, and material components of Classical Ile-Ife in different parts of Yoruba-Edo region between the thirteenth and sixteenthcenturies (Ogundiran, 2001 , 2002b , 2002c , 2003 ). Extensive production of glass beads, oneof the most important paraphernalia of kingship and social ranking, seems to have been

dominated by Ile-Ife. In controlling this key object of political capital, Ile-Ife became thesource of symbols of ofce for the rapidly growing dynastic kingships across the regionbetween ca. 1200 and 1400 (Ogundiran, 2003 ).

The predominant view has been that the manufacture of glass beads in Ile-Ife involvedmelting and reworking glass imported from European and Islamic glass-making centers viathe trans-Saharan trading routes (Willett, 1977 , 2004 ; also see Robertshaw et al. , 2003 ),although a number of scholars have speculated the possibility that glass was produced fromthe local quartz-silica minerals (e.g., Eluyemi, 1987 , p. 213; Fagg, 1980 , p. 10; Horton, 1992 ,p. 132; also see Ajetunmobi, 1989 ). However, recent analyses of glass beads, cullets, andcrucibles from Ile-Ife, from ninth to thirteenth century contexts, reveal that the beads havehigh lime and high alumina content, which rule out the possibility that some of the glass wasimported from Europe, the Middle East, or Asia (Ige et al. , 2006 ) areas where glass beadsgenerally have low lime and alumina content. The study therefore suggests that some of theIfe glass beads were made of glass locally manufactured from wood ash and high-aluminasand. However, the same study also shows that some of the glass beads as well as the cobaltused to color the locally produced glass probably came from South Asia (Ige et al. 2006 ).The implication of all of these is that glass and glass beads were being locally produced inIle-Ife simultaneous with the importation of South Asian glass beads.

The production of exotic objects and of exquisite artworks was not, however, limited to

Ile-Ife. Ile-Ife had a monopoly on glass beads before the fteenth century, but cylindrical redbeads of jasper and carnelian (red chalcedony), also important paraphernalia of kingship andelite status, were produced in other areas of theYoruba-Edoregion. Preliminary investigationsat Old Oyo and in the Igbomina area of north-central Yoruba have provided evidence of exoticstone bead manufacture no later than the thirteenth century (Obayemi, 1985 , p. 291; Willett,1960 , pp. 63, 74). Naturalistic stone sculptures of humans were also made in Igbomina areaand have been found at Esie, Ofaro, Ipo, and Ijara (Usman, 2001 ). The majority of thesesculptures, about 800 in total, are at Esie (Stevens, 1978 ). Their archaeological contextshave not yet been dened, so their implications for sociopolitical development and cultural

transformations in the region remain speculative (Adepegba, 1982; Andah, 1982a ; Drewalet al. , 1989 , p. 88).

Oyo Empire

Of all the Yoruba-Edo polities that emerged between A.D. 800 and 1500, only one attainedthe status of an imperial hegemon. This was the Oyo Empire which came into prominencein the sixteenth century (Law, 1977 ), about the same time that Bornu began to hold swayover the Chad Basin. Archaeological investigations have focused on the capital of the empireitself, Oyo-Ile. The research agenda has however not been tailored to understanding howthis Guinea Savanna polity gained ground to become the most powerful political formationin seventeenth century Yorubaland. Rather, research interests have focused on dening basicchronological sequences, mapping and describing the archaeological remains at the site,including walls and remnants of house structures, and understanding the inventory of artifactclasses, especially pottery (Agbaje-Williams, 1983 ; Soper, 1992 ; Soper and Darling, 1980 ).Contexts that could shed light on the dynamics of social structure and hierarchies in themetropolis, such as the royal burial site of Oyo monarchs and the residences of the elite

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population, have not been investigated. The mapping of the palace structures has not beenfollowed by systematic excavations (Soper, 1992 ); and questions of the economy, militarysystem, and ideology of the empire have not been addressed archaeologically, although their general patterns are known from historical studies (e.g, Johnson, 1921 ; Law, 1977 ).

Meanwhile, ongoing archaeological investigations at the frontiers of the empire, in areaseither colonized or conquered, have begun to address questions concerning the developmentof imperial Oyo and its consequences for the Yoruba region. In north-central Yorubaland,Usman ( 2001 ) has applied a version of core-periphery model (e.g., Chase-Dunn and Hall,1991 ) to explain how the rise of Old Oyo empire and its imperial ambitions in north-central Yoruba against the competing interests of Nupe accelerated the process of socialcomplexity in Igbominaland during the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Theresult was that the political system in Igbomina was militarized, and elaborate defensivemechanisms were constructed. Through migrations from the Old Oyo core to the Igbominaperipheries, as well as through inter-marriages between the elites of the two areas, Usmansuggests, the Oyo ceramic forms were adopted in Igbomina but did not displace the pre-imperial ceramic complex. Delineating a six-hundred-year settlement history of Igbominawith archaeological, oral historical, ethnographic, and archival sources, Usman ( 2005 , p.361) concludes that Igbomina was affected by the challenges of political insecurity fromthe sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries because of its location in the periphery of hegemonic and expansionist political centers , in this case, Old Oyo and Nupe (also seeAleru, 1998 , p. 148). My own recent excavations in Central Yorubaland have also begun toexamine the nature of imperial colonization that Old Oyo initiated in the Upper Osun regionduring the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. The focus of excavations was on Ede-Ile,

possibly the rst successful military and colonial outpost that Old Oyo established towardsachieving its imperial ambitions. The several remains of horses and arrow-points found at thesite conrm that Ede-Ile was a military town, and the abundance of cowries indicates that thetown was also an important commercial center connected to the Atlantic coastal trade fromwhere cowries were carried into the hinterlands as currency. Diverse craft productions alsotook place at this imperial frontier site as evidenced by the presence of spindle whorls, ironslag and smelting furnaces. The analysis of the archaeological nds at Ede-Ile is ongoing,and the results will provide fresh perspectives on the rise of Old Oyo Empire. In fact, we maybe able to understand this process better by studying the peripheries, frontiers, and colonial

outposts of the empire than by focusing on the metropolis itself.

Urbanism: Research agenda

Urbanization, as a feature of cultural evolution and settlement studies, has often been singledout for archaeological investigation in Nigerian archaeology (Andah, 1982b ). For the mostpart, archaeologists have been attracted to the study of urban centers associated with so-ciopolitical centralization such as Oyo-Ile, Ile-Ife, Benin, Birni Gazargamo, and Kano witha particular focus on mapping their perimeter walls, delineating their public buildings, andestimating their population and physical sizes. Ile-Ife, the oldest known urban center in therainforest belt, received early archaeological attention (Ozanne, 1969 ). The survey of theIfe walls shows that the city was enclosed by two major concentric embankments, the inner and outer walls. The inner wall was about 7 km in circumference with a maximum diameter of about 2.3 km; and the much bigger outer wall had a circumference of ca. 15 km and amaximum diameter of approximately 5.2 km (Agbaje-Williams, 2005). There were perhapsseventy thousand people living in the city at the height of its glory between the thirteenth

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and early fteenth centuries (Kusimba et al. , 1999 ). A characteristic element of this urbansocial space is that several of its public roads were paved with potsherds often laid on their edges in herringbone patterns. It is estimated that an area of about 12 square kilometers of the city was paved with potsherds between the twelfth and fteenth centuries (Ogunfolakan,

1994 ). In an experiment carried out by Babatunde Agbaje-Williams in 1996, it took aboutthirty-two hours of one-person labor to construct a potsherd pavement in a 2 2 m area(Agbaje-Williams, 2001 ). Those who laid the Ife potsherd pavement were possibly moreskillful and efcient than the experimenters, and it is likely that the number of labor hoursper meter was considerably less. Nevertheless, it would have required the mobilization of a large workforce to construct the numerous paved roads in and around Ile-Ife before thefteenth century, a phenomenon that etched a permanent imprint on the social memory of the populace until today (Akinjogbin and Ayandele, 1980 , p. 126).

In the savanna of northwest Yoruba lies the capital of Old Oyo Empire. It seems theoccupation of Old Oyo by thriving agricultural communities was well in place around theninth century A.D. (Agbaje-Williams, 1983 ), and by the fteenth century, a fully edgedtown had evolved and was on the path of becoming the capital of the largest empire southof River Niger (Soper and Darling, 1980 ). The archaeological survey of the city revealedthat ve major wall systems were built between the sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries.At its peak in the mid-eighteenth century, the imperial capital of Old Oyo covered an areaof more than 5,000 hectares, with diameters of 10 km north-south and 6 km east-west. Itis estimated that between 60,000 and 140,000 people occupied the city in the eighteenthcentury (Agbaje-Williams, 1983 ). The attempt to understand the regional settlement systemin which Oyo-Ile was located has led to the discovery and mapping of substantial towns, such

as Ipapo-Ile and Koso, within 10 km of the city. The role that these satellite towns played inrelation to Oyo-Ile is now a subject of an on-going investigation (Agbaje-Williams, 1989a ,1989b , 1990 ).

Connah has also revealed the remains of the city walls of Benin City possibly builtbetween the thirteenth and mid-fteenth century (Connah, 1964 , 1972 , 1975 ). The main andinnermost wall system consisted of a bank and ditch. The embankment averaged 17.4 min height with a circumference of about 11.6 km. Connah estimates that if the constructionof the wall system had been completed within a dry season (three months), it would haverequired 5000 people working 10 h. Connahs survey also discovered an interlocking system

of enclosures totaling 145 km in length within and in the outskirts of the innermost and major wall system of Benin. These smaller enclosures, similar to the ones identied by Darling(1984 ) in the Esan area, marked the boundaries of several towns and villages in the Beninarea and possibly date to the rst millennium A.D. Connah ( 1975 ) has concluded that BeninCity and its walls evolved from the coalescing of populations in those pre-existing villagesand towns.

Likewise, archaeological surveys have been conducted in different parts of Hausaland tounderstand the size and layout of pre-colonial cities and towns in the region. A more detailedinvestigation and publication have come out of the research at Turunku, the capital of theancient state of Zazzau, 42 km south of modern Zaria. Turunku had two wall (earth rampart)systems, the outer one covers an area of 6 km 2 . and the inner one encloses 0.3 km 2 . The highdensity of structural debris within the inner wall contrasts with the sparse archaeologicalremains between the inner and the outer wall, an indication that the latter area was used for farming activities, in order to ensure access to food during times of siege (Effah-Gyam,1986 ).

In recent years, there has been a shift of research interest fromthe major political capitals tothe lesser-known towns in the hinterlands or periphery of the major metropolises, especially

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in north-central Yorubaland (Aleru, 1998 ; Usman, 2001 ), central Yorubaland (Ogundiran,2002c ), and the Edo-Esan area (also see Darling, 1984 ). The diverse material culture of these townships reveals that they were multifunctional communities of farmers, traders,beadworkers, iron-smelters, blacksmiths, potters, dyers and weavers, etc. Nevertheless, the

orientation of most of the studies of urbanism is the same: toward assessing the sizes of citiesand towns, rather than the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural aspects of urban life. In fact,much more emphasis has been placed on the style of wall construction and their layout thanon the broad spectrum of material culture. Most studies have not been informative on thenature of demography (with the exception of the population estimates of Old Oyo by Agbaje-Williams, 1983 ), social stratication,politicalorganization, and economic specialization, andthe nature of everyday life. Therefore, we still do not have a clear idea how to differentiate atown or a city from its rural hinterland, or whether such an urban-rural dichotomy is realisticfor pre-colonial Nigeria. Since an urban center represents to a large extent the macrocosm of an extended family compound, and given the wider networks of social relationships that weremade possible by urban communities, future studies would be better served in consideringhow urbanism affected the social construction of gender, family, and individuality. Rather than treating urbanism as an artifact to be mapped and described, attention should be devotedto excavating the residential units and compounds within the town and city walls in order to begin to address urbanism as a sociocultural system, and thereby highlight the quotidianlives of the urban populace.

Due to the conation of the study of cities and towns with that of city-states and so-ciopolitical centralization, the advent of urbanism in Nigeria has so far been associated inthe literature with the rise of divine kingships and militaristic/hegemonic monarchs between

the ninth and fteenth centuries (Andah, 1982b ). The presence of walled settlement clusterssuch as those documented in predynastic Benin and Esan and possibly also in predynasticIle-Ife and Kano, make us question the dominant idea of urbanism as monolithic structures,imposed by a coercive state apparatus forcing a heterogenous population to crowd together(McIntosh, 1991 , p. 199). The predynastic clustering of settlements in Nigeria seems to besimilar to the situation in the Inland Niger Delta (at Jenne-jeno, Mali) whereby the set-tlement cluster around Jenne-jeno formed a constellation of craft/occupational specialistsas a strategy for maintaining boundaries between specialist communities, simultaneouslyallowing these corporations to exploit proximity to clients and suppliers of other services

without surrendering their identity and independence to a single urban center and a bu-reaucracy (McIntosh, 1991 , p. 204; also see McIntosh and McIntosh, 1993 ). The Jenne-jenosituation has important implications for the conceptualization of urbanism in pre-colonialNigeria. However, we need to focus on the regional settlement patterns and their artifactualcomposition, rather than on single urban centers. The former approach is most likely to yieldinformation on the causes and circumstances of urbanism (McIntosh and McIntosh, 1984 :94). This approach is already anticipated in the work of Babatunde Agbaje-Williams ( 1983 ,1989a , 1989b ) with his focus on the city of Old Oyo and its satellite towns of Koso, Ipapo,and Igboho.

Atlantic encounter and its impact, 15001900

A signicant portion of archaeological research in Nigeria has focused on the last ve hundredyears, and the material evidence of the entanglement of the different regions of Nigeria inthe Atlantic economic system has been widely documented. Beginning ca. A.D. 1600, thearchaeological record shows that the Atlantic-oriented commerce signicantly added to

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the repertoire of everyday material life, initially more in the coastal regions than in thehinterlands. By the early eighteenth century, however, the material signature of the Atlanticeconomy had become ubiquitous in the hinterlands of West Africa (e.g., Connah, 1975 ; seechapters in DeCorse, 2001 ; Stahl, 2001 ; Ogundiran, 2002c ). The most detailed excavations,

to reveal the immense diversity that the entanglement in the Atlantic commerce wrought onthe material life of a Nigerian hinterland are those conducted by Connah ( 1975 ) in Benin.The imported artifacts documented at the sites- bronze/brass, clay pipes, buttons, cowries,European ceramics, glass beads, musket balls, swords, and iron- conrm the intimate tradingrelations that developed between Benin and various European nations in A.D. 15001850.The majority of the port sites in the Bight of Benin that served as early centers of economicexchanges between Europeans and Africans - Ughoton, Ode-Itsekiri, Ijebu Lagoon-side -have not been excavated.

So far, the imported objects, such as moneta cowries, beads, and tobacco pipes, have beenused as type-fossils for chronological inferences (Walker, 1975 ; York, 1972 ). The use of these objects for studying how the expanding global economic system shaped daily mate-rial life, social relations, and household and extra-household production and consumption,with explicit research designs and relevant theoretical frameworks, is only just beginning(Ogundiran, 2006 ). This emerging interest in the archaeology of the Atlantic period focuseson contextual interpretations of the Atlantic imports, marrying the historicity of world sys-tems theory with comprehensive understanding of the local cultural systems. One componentof this research seeks to understand how the Atlantic imports were used as objects of culturaland political capital, with major impacts on the physical and cognitive realities of the peopleof the Bight of Benin, and the impacts of the new varieties and sheer volume of the new

commodities on the overall cultural transformations in the region (Ogundiran, 2002d ).It was, however, not only imported commodities that transformed the material and socio-

cultural lives, but also the introduction of American food cropsespecially maize, cassava,and varieties of beans. The understanding of the impacts of these American cultigens onAfrican populations remains rudimentary partly because their evidence is tenuous or un-recoverable in the archaeological record. The imported crop that played the most criticalrole in daily lives was maize (Miracle, 1966 ). Maize cob impressions on ceramics werepresent by the seventeenth century, and gained so much currency that by the late eighteenthand early nineteenth centuries, maize-cob-rouletted motifs (with or without seeds) increas-

ingly displaced the twisted cord motifs, especially on large vessels, in Central Yorubaland(Ogundiran, 2002c ; Shaw, 1985 , p. 52). The lower investment of labor required in maizecultivation than other Western African crops, especially yams, might have made maize aprime food item in the seventeenth century, especially during the several drought years of that century (Brooks, 2003, pp. 102103). Archaeologists have yet to assess the forms of agro-ecological and landscape transformations, and changes in farming techniques that re-sulted from the adoption of American crops, not only in Nigeria but also in West Africaas a whole. In addition, the impacts of the Euro-American Atlantic slave system on theNigerian hinterlands, and its articulation with the trans-Saharan/sudanic slave system, havereceived preliminary archaeological attention, especially in reference to the defensive strate-gies against enslavement that developed in many parts of Nigeria, mostly among small-scalesocieties (e.g., Gronenborn, 2001 ; MacEachern, 2001 ).

The British colonial transformations, 18501940

The material consequences of European colonialism are often visible in the uppermosthorizons of archaeological sites all over the country. These horizons, mostly dating to

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between ca. 1850 and 1940, indicate of the development of modern tastes and consumptionpatterns, an

ogundiran - four millennia of cultural history in nigeria

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