The Ancients - The Nok Culture

Episode Date: March 30, 2025

In the heart of ancient Nigeria, a mysterious civilisation flourished - known today only through archaeology. The Nok Culture, symbolised by its striking terracotta figurines, remains one of Africa’s most fascinating yet overlooked ancient societies.In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr. Kevin MacDonald to uncover the secrets of the Nok. Who were they? Where did they live? And what can their incredible artistry tell us about Iron Age West Africa? From groundbreaking archaeological discoveries to the enduring mystery of their decline, this is the story of one of Africa’s earliest known civilisations.For more on the ancient Iron Age world, our episode on the Birth of the Iron Age with Eric Cline can be found here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6emHXY7Cv8xImTcVAi4mrfPresented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music from Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here:https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes and if you would like the ancient ad free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting HistoryHit.com slash subscribe. 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, symbolised 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 Nok? 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 dialled in to join us for this chat and I'm really grateful for Kevin's time to talk all things 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. To talk about the Nock culture, and It's about time we explored more of these extraordinary

ancient African civilizations or cultures. But with the Nok, Kevin, is this a culture that we know of exclusively from archaeology? Yes, there is no textual record referring to it. Indeed, even the word Nok 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 Nook?

We're looking at central Nigeria in an area running north and south of the Jos Plateau. One of the larger modern towns would be the capital Abuja. 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 nook. It used to be when archaeologists were first working on it 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. How long has archaeological work been going on? 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. They were first discovered in 1928 during opencast tin mining on the Joss Plateau. There were frequent finds from tin mining, and this led to, at the beginning of the formation of the Nigerian antiquities service, then 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 earlier sites 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 twenty seventeen. There was a great number of settlement sites found so you know well over a hundred sites now. What is the. In the beginning these were sort of isolated find spots and i should rush to outline if anybody looks online and sees some of the pictures of these opencast tin mining sites on the Joss Plateau, they'll think, how is this possible?

You know, you're finding these sort of, you know, statuettes tens of meters deep. What sort of time scale are we working at here? There's a lot of this is these 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 archeological sense, tens of meters beneath the surface. Most of the sites where these are found in better context are just, you're probably finding things a meter below the surface or 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 are come from. These are from essentially disintegrated villages that have been lost off the edges of cliff erosion. In context, they're in village sites or cemetery sites, which are not really very far beneath the surface at all. 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 2000 years ago, or roughly 2000 years ago? It would have been greener than today, no doubt, but even today, even though this is

sort of a semi-desertic area and parts, that desertic is too strong. Let's say arid area today. 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 NARC is millet. And this was a 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 ancient, so don't you worry. 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 NOC, 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 Breunig and his team, who worked for a decade or so in this area, they completely revolutionized our understanding of the settlement landscape. We're looking at relatively small villages, nothing much greater than what would be 100 by 100 meters,

a hectare. We're dealing with what would be, by archaeological 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 a pearl millet, but also as a protein, you have cow peas 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.

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, 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 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 assumed 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 subtle areas like this where you have a lot of tsetse. So you need these breeds which are what we call tropano 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, 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. But yes, we're looking at small farming farming communities but which are doing very advanced things for the time. Real artistic pioneers in africa and also potentially technological 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. The houses that they were probably living in these villages, it's very difficult to find the remains of those. The traces that they leave are 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. Whether from hearths or whether from actual full-scale conflagrations, you have the fact that buildings

get burnt and you have some very clear burnt Waddle and Dob remains. So in other words, clay fragments which have stick marks in them or pull marks on them, which give us a clear idea that you have a sort of a lattice work of some sort of wood being overlaid 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. When 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 Noxides. 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, NARC 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 other is always different. What do we think was the process then okay they've got their clay their clay sources, they're going to make these figurines, these remarkable statuettes. Do we know much about the whole process of 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, you know, CAT scans of these, many of these statues in world museums, it's evident that they are kind of a hodgepodge of fragments of statuettes and that they've been refinished or resorted 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 mind the remains of these which were. Produced quite frequently by the not culture. And then improve to 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 heads, 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 are some sorts for intact statues without abraded surfaces somewhere that the archaeologists are missing, or as

CAT scans have shown, these are restored, shall we say. That's probably the most generous term I get to them. They've been restored. There's no doubt that they're complex. There's no doubt that they are complex. There's no doubt that they're every bit as amazing, whether fragmentary or not. These restorations are very much true to reimagining the tradition as it's attested to by these objects. But I suspect 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 originally they are deposited by the Nox in 2000 years ago. But that said, I can just add something here. We do know that they are being built in some senses like pottery. They're being coil-built.

Just like 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, if, if you or I or anyone were learning pottery making in some class, you'd probably start by taking, making these sort of snakes or these coils of pottery and building them up, you know, and shaping them. And that's what's happening. You have what, if, if you look inside or, or again, use some sort of CAT scan on these statues, what you find is that they're hollow interior. So in some sense is this is.

Statuary meeting pottery technology. What's built up into some more tubular form there than worked and and perhaps also added to. And perhaps also added to, like pottery, would be added to. 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 mention that they are hollow, surely that makes them even more brittle, surely it makes them much more easy to break? Yes. 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 too 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 we've used words like statuette too. Kevin, should we not be imagining very, very big statues? Were we thinking 30 centimetres high roughly or what should we be imagining? Kevin Yes, I mean, bigger statues,

pushing cords a metre. They'm much more used to, because my own work is largely been in the Niger River Basin, I'm much more used to the Genetaricata tradition. So these are, you know, double, three times, four times the size of Genetaricata. So they're quite substantial. Yeah. I mean, they come in different size ranges. But Substantial. Yeah. I mean, 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 Beinu, it doesn't straddle the Niger. So maybe 100 kilometres, 200 kilometres away from the Niger River. It's just asking potentially, because I know it's a large area, but potentially is it 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 Nock 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 broining team 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 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 making its way down with agricultural populations, which are expanding 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, they're producing any statues or before they're producing iron, that these are food producing, farming, agro-pastoral peoples coming down from the north, settling in 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 mini small settlements, small farming settlements.

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 Noc's case, they can be both relatively flat, just in shape, but they can also be tubular, which is much more complicated to make because you imagine you're having to

– they can 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 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 medieval periods, is this carnelian coming from Gujarat in India. So those are your 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, it doesn't mean direct, but it does mean it's being traded hand to hand and getting done. And it's getting done 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 not 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 one possibility is always ivory because we forget, you know, these days we look at Africa

and you know, 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, which I've visited years ago myself.

But it was 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, a wild game wipeout across West Africa. 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. Mason- That's interesting, isn't it? I hadn't thought of ivory at all when thinking about artefacts. 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. Do we have many ivory artefacts as decoration from within the knot 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 Atnock just because of the soil conditions, So we wouldn't be able to say, I can't remember seeing much in the way of referencing ivory in the statuettes themselves. So that was just a spontaneous speculation of 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 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 zoolomorphic. There's one I remember which is a serpent called 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. They have some have facial hair, some don't. You can have individuals that just have goatees. You can have individuals which have sort of more of a fuller beard with a 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, so for example, you have sort of a genre where you have depictions of people with bird beaks. So 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 or sort of godlike or ancestral figures? And what are they being used for? And the old idea, so the first archeologist to work on the Nocturne-Cartesian publisher book on them was Bernard Fagg. One of his hypotheses was that these might have been, because they're sort of

tubular and they're hollow, right? I mean, they're not, they do a lot to disguise the tubular nature, but he was saying they could be used as finials at the entrances of houses. So almost like house markers, you know, where you'd have them stuck up outside your front door. 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 Nock than say, you know, the comparable terracotta tradition, which is the Jinné 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 noxites and find spots in quantity.

And this is where it becomes clear that you have, you know, these statues 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 be here or you know anywhere else you do a block lift all the stuff and then you know excavate them in the lab and you find out that you've got you know no single intact statue you have not even you know 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 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 on 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 when not finding them? Are they being used as, like Bernard Fang said, are they being used as finials on houses? And then 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 Sanufo of Mali 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. 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 Mandai world, nyama. So they have power and they're associated with certain individuals. And in order to keep those individuals from still acting in this world after their death, you

need to contain those objects, you need to smash them so they're no longer intact, you need to mix them up, and you need to bury them when you're burying the dead. So in the Sanufu areas that I'm familiar with, you have a situation whereby when someone dies, if the last water glass they were drinking from, you're gonna dispose of that. If it was a woman and she had her heart stones, you're gonna 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 gonna 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. I'm not saying this is the same thing, but I'm saying it's a model of some reasons that these are objects which could have been very actively used during an individual's lifetime, but then after their death they become dangerous and so you have to smash them up again that's in terms of coming up with explanations that's an explanation for why they are quite consciously not allowing a. Statue to go entire even if broken up into a. It's almost, I'm just trying to think of a parallel and I think isn't it an ancient

Egyptian culture or ancient Cushite 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 hold 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,

you know, 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, knock culture area and that eventually we might find, for some reason, these objects intact. But there's something similar working on various tell sites associated with the Empire of Ghana and the Empire of Mali is that when you have abandonment layers in these tell sites, which have layer upon layer of houses, and you're consciously abandoning one, probably because of a death or some tragedy, and you're leaving objects say that were in a house within the house, oftentimes you'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. 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, fire-hardening the clay, then making the terracotta, or then fire-hardening it? There were specific people who knew the craft or were guest professionals, or that everyone, everyone had to kind of learn how to make these. OK, 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. 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,

blacksmith lineages are quite isolated. They marry into themselves. They keep themselves to themselves because they have this transformative power. So one would imagine that the same people who might be considered the most powerful blacksmiths might be the people who are making these objects. But another thing which comes to mind is the degree, because again, we're, you know, we're part of Narc is on the Bennu, although it doesn't run quite right to allow things to flow through the area. But it's remarkable the degree to which different areas of production can be concentrated. So years ago, I worked in a very ancient town in Mali called Diyat. And in Diyat, 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 sort of water pots called jidaga. And jidaga are really indispensable in the cell. They cool your water. They're the sort of a central point of any household is having a couple of really good jidagas. And they are a very typical wedding gift. So if you newly wed, they get jidagas, but they get jidagas from these people in Diyar. And so every day, it would seem, a letter would travel upriver or downriver to these potters and they would say, this is what we want on the pots because they put like the people's names and we need it delivered by this date.

And then every day there would be parades 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 waterpots were being distributed. So you can imagine a situation with NOC. And we do. I mean, there is remarkably one NOC terracotta of two people in a boat. They are. They are. You know, they definitely were using boats.

But, you know, you do think that people are commissioning these. Maybe while you're alive, if you're a family leader, you go to this making area and they sort of do a portrait of you or some sort of caricature of you that they then supply to you. Maybe if it's a point of pilgrimage or something, you have to, someplace you have to go to. It's like going to the big city. You go down there. Instead of getting your photograph made or your portrait painted or whatever, you get on and you have a terracotta made of you, if you're important, and you bring it home. 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, it's so interesting, nonetheless, and especially for such a mysterious culture. I mean, Kevin, I could ask so much more about that. But as we near in the end, we got to also talk about iron because it taught 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 nap stone artifacts and pottery around 1500 BC.

And then somewhere around 800 BC, the terracotta production begins and iron production begins, more or less the same time. I'm sure they don't map neatly onto each other, but at the level of resolution we have, that's what it looks like. Also, what's interesting is in terms of looking at the connections between the terracottas and the iron, recent excavations at Jamjala find a fragmentary terracotta as an offering in each decommissioned iron furnace. So just underlining know, underlining the link. But so iron smelting at 800 BC, what does it mean? Well, the problem, there's been an ongoing research dispute in Africa over whether or not iron metallurgy is indigenous or not. And this has been going on since the 1970s.

NOC has played a role in this. 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 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 at date 600, it could mean 800. If you get something at date 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 a thousand outside of this flattening and 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 so mad, people are always debating the rightness or wrongness of dates, but Senegal around 900 BC to 1000, I think it's possible. But I'm not one of the metallurgical specialists and they tend to defend their ability to make these sorts of declarations. So everything remains up in the air. The difficulty is that Africa has not yet been shown to have what would be called a Bronze Age or a Copper Age elsewhere in

the world. And the idea is in terms of the steps of technology, you need to understand how to smelt copper or to make bronze before you can go to iron, because iron making is more tricky than those other things. There is some argument that you could go straight to iron, but nobody's ever really been very happy with that. It would require a lot of coincidences. So we might not see it in my lifetime, but personally, I believe we will eventually find that there is a copper age in Mauritania and that this leads to an indigenous creation of iron technology in Africa, probably in the area of Mauritania, Senegal, something like that.

That's my own, I'm putting it out there. A lot of people might disagree, but that's my instinct. We can see in about 50 years time if I'm right or not, if this recording is preserved, we shall see. That is my prediction. But so whether, you know, this is definitely early. It's not quite old enough to be, you know, 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, for working wood and everything. So axes and adzes are being made out of iron, but also bits of personal endowment. So iron rings, whether bracelets and necklaces are being made also. So it's both functional and prestige-oriented at the same time.

And the sorts of furnaces are distinctive. They're what we would call low furnaces and they're bellows driven. So, you know, with the bags on the the pipes, which are called tuyères, 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 relatively small diameter furnaces, maybe a meter, meter 20 in diameter, anywhere from 80 centimeters to a meter 20. And as is often the case with such furnaces, you have sometimes dedicatory offerings which are beneath the furnace. And then when you close the furnace, you also do something. Close the furnace. Sometimes you might find a pot. I'm not talking so much about knockers more broadly than Africa 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 you know this is a smiths are so linked to the making of. These statues and if we look at much more historic situations again in the the mandate world so particularly. It molly and there's a great book by mcnotton on the mandate black smiths which is worth looking at because it gives a lot of the historical context of black smiths in this area. You know black smiths are a cast and another themselves they're part of what's called the Niamma Kala, those who shape Niamma. And generally speaking in the man-day world within blacksmith families, the men can make sort of magical earthen objects. They also obviously do all the metalworking and the metal smelting and the creation of the metal objects. But the women within the blacksmith cast, which is referred to as the Numu, they do the pottery making.

So, you know, and that's not just in the Mandir world, it's in other parts of Africa as well, but you have past blacksmiths. So this is very, you know, early on, knock, and as before, generally, people want to talk about there being casts in Africa. But you know, this is a group that's doing absolutely amazing things with terracotta at the same time as they're doing absolutely pioneering things with ironworking. Yes. Do we know what happens to the Nock culture? They seem to last for quite a long time. Do we know what follows them almost? Well, this is what's peculiar because Nock peculiar because NOC just kind of fizzles between 300 BC and the first century AD date-wise. 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 fall off in our numbers of radiocarbon days 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. There's this sort of peak intensity between 800 or at best 900 BC, might have the earliest terracottas by then, but more certainly from 800 BC, 300 BC is just a cliff edge drop off. Something happens then.

There are all sorts of things one can invoke. You could say there could be conflict, there could be environmental collapse. These are all the sort of things we tend to use as explanations, but there is no good evidence yet to explain that collapse. And then, you know, there is nothing very special in the area for a while after that. That said, Nigeria remains one of the peak areas in Africa for technological sophistication. So, you know, it's centuries later, but farther south in the Ibo 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 or 1000 AD, you have at Ife, and not to mention Benin, but at Ife, you have these fantastic naturalistic sculptures of rulers and high-casted people, sort of nobility or whatever, which are utterly naturalistic, amazing sculptures. And then also at Ife, the work of Tunde Baba Lola, it's clear that there is early glass making and extensive and very sophisticated glass making at Yifei. So there is sort of a gap of maybe a thousand years between knock and what comes later in terms of high technology artwork, but it does come. And so it's almost a foreshadowing.

But the other thing I would just bear in mind in all of this, and I always say this, this is what we can see. What we can see is all of the wooden sculpture traditions. I mean, there's very little wood artistry in Africa, which for obvious, you know, environmental and preservation reasons, you know, we can maybe look back a few hundred years at best. But probably before there was no 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. This, you know, we have artistic woodworking we see the sort of tools that they would have been used this

you know we have small woodworking tools even from you know 2000 BC 1000 BC so what we can see are the wooden sculpture traditions which have now largely vanished well we get some idea about what survived and what was documented in the 19th century in the early 20th century. 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 on the podcast today.

Very welcome. It's been a pleasure. much for taking the time to 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, Nok 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. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. Now, don't forget, for listening. Please follow The Ancients on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, it really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. Now don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts ad free, and watch hundreds of TV documentaries

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