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
Chapter 1: Who were the Nok people?
It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. Today we're covering another of those mysterious, too often overlooked ancient civilizations. A people who lived in ancient Nigeria, known today solely through archaeology, symbolized by extraordinary terracotta figurines. The Nok culture.
Search Nok culture in your browser today and straight away images of these striking statuettes appear. They are some of the most eye-catching examples of ancient art so far found anywhere in Africa, depicting all sorts of subjects. And unsurprisingly, they will feature heavily in today's conversation. So who were the Nok? Whereabouts in Africa did they live?
Chapter 2: What are the key features of Nok culture?
And what has archaeology so far revealed about this mysterious Iron Age culture? Well, joining me to explain all is Dr Kevin MacDonald, a professor of African archaeology at University College London. Kevin dialed in to join us for this chat, and I'm really grateful for Kevin's time to talk all the things the Nok culture.
Rarely does the Nok get the attention it deserves, so enjoy as we delve into its mysterious story. Kevin, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. Thank you. Glad to be here. Let's talk about the Nok culture, and it's about time we explored more of these extraordinary ancient African civilisations 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. And indeed, even the word knock 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.
Chapter 3: When and where did the Nok civilization exist?
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 Joss Plateau. So one of the larger modern towns would be the capital, Abuja. So its radius is being continually redefined by archaeological work. But effectively, if you imagine Nigeria, it's directly in the middle of the modern country.
And how big a period of time in ancient history are we talking about with the knock?
It used to be, when archaeologists were first working on it, that they're imagining something beginning around 500 BC and then running on for a few hundred years after that. As more work has gone on, particularly in the past 20 years, it's become evident that we're dealing with something which has a much longer duration, starting around 1500 BC.
and then continuing really on to maybe the first century AD.
And you mentioned there archaeological work on the Nock. I mean, how long has archaeological work been going on? I mean, how long has it been since the Nock have been rediscovered?
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Chapter 4: What archaeological discoveries reveal about the Nok?
The initial discoveries were these, of course, rather remarkable terracottas, which are associated with this archaeological entity. And they were first discovered in 1928 during 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, them being summoned out to these sites to try and better understand the context of these statues, statuettes, figurines being found.
Do we know by now, let's say almost 100 years later, if that was the earliest site that became NOC associated with this archaeological entity, do we have quite a number of sites today in that area of Nigeria that seems to be linked together with similar sorts of artefacts? Do we have a wider range of archaeological sites today?
Yes. Again, thanks to this cooperative German-Nigerian program, which has been going on since I think around 2006 and then went on up until 2017, there was a great number of settlement sites found, so well over 100 sites now. But 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're finding these statuettes tens of meters deep. What sort of timescale are we working at here? A lot of this is, these finds are not being found in context. These aren't village remains of these initial finds.
These are finds that have been part of slope erosion in these areas and carried down due to rains into valley areas and therefore are being found for that reason. So they're not really, in an archaeological sense, tens of meters beneath the surface.
Most of the sites where these are found in better context are just, you'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 come from. These are from essentially disintegrated villages that have been lost off the edges of cliff erosion.
So in context, they're in village sites or cemetery sites, which are not really very far beneath the surface at all.
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Chapter 5: How did the Nok people live and farm?
nothing any larger than that, spaced out relatively evenly on the landscape. And you have the use, particularly of pearl millet, but also as a protein, you have cowpeas being cultivated as well. You have canarium trees being exploited. And interestingly, oil palm, which is in use in the area today, does not appear to have been exploited at the time of not
We have a problem archaeologically in that there is very poor bone preservation in this area because of acidic soils. So it's very hard to tell what was being exploited in terms of livestock or hunted game. We can make assumptions. We can suppose that there might be, because there was elsewhere at this time,
In this part of Africa, if we go particularly towards, say, Ghana to the west, at this time you would have had cattle, and you would have also had sheep and goat. So we sort of assumed that there would be cattle and sheep and goat, probably of dwarf breeds or smaller breeds, because they need to be so in order to be able to survive in more subtly areas like this where you have a lot of tzitzi.
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, has a sort of consequent effect of dwarfism. So you have size reduction.
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 communities, but which are doing very advanced things for their time. Real artistic pioneers in Africa and also potentially pyrotechnological or metallurgical pioneers as well.
So probably livestock, certainly agriculture. One more question on the settlements themselves, Kevin. It sounds like, though, from the area of the world that the archaeology is being done, do you therefore have quite a lot of the organic material? It doesn't survive. The houses that they were probably living in in these villages, it's very difficult to find the remains of those.
The traces that they leave, are they quite scant?
What you have, and this is often the case in this time period in various parts of West Africa, is you have the chance encounter of buildings with fire. So whether from hearths or whether from actual full-scale conflagrations, you have the fact that buildings get burnt and you have some very clear burnt walls wattle and daub remains.
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Chapter 6: What materials did the Nok use for their artwork?
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 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 in 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 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 had very few elephants, they're not entirely gone.
I mean, there's one large active herd between Burkina Faso and Mali that goes up and down in that area every year, and which I've visited years ago myself. But it was 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 musketeers.
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 Knock 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 sort of a spontaneous speculation on my part.
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Chapter 7: What was the significance of the Nok figurines?
If every house has one, then that's sort of... In terms of the number of finds and the likelihood of finding such objects, much greater for knock than, say, the comparable terracotta tradition, which is the Djinne terracotta tradition in Mali, or indeed other traditions in Niger and so on. This is, of course, where this new research project in the 2000s
really move things along because it began excavating knock sites and find spots in quantity and this is where it becomes clear that you have you know these statues are fragmentary you you say you're you find a pit and you're excavating a pit and you start finding terracotta fragments in it And then you get them all out or you do a block lift, as you might do here or anywhere else.
You do a block lift of all the stuff and then excavate them in the lab. And you find out that you've got no single intact statue. You have not even one that's broken up. You have several that have been broken up, incomplete, and put into a pit. 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, are in proximity of cemeteries. Oh, okay. So there's a mortuary tradition going along with this. And then you have to come up with an explanation of... You know, why aren't these going into graves intact? Why are they being broken?
Why are they being broken in multiple ways and mixed up? You know, is there some place where they're intact? We're not finding them. You know, are they being used as, like Bernard Fagg said, are they being used as finials on houses? And then, you know, when that person dies, you take them down and break them.
It does make me think, I mean, there are several traditions like this, but in terms of ones that I'm personally familiar with, you have this process amongst the Sanufu of Mali and then an area south of Mali as well. But where I've seen this is in Mali. where there is the disposal of the things of the dead. And I mean, you can see this elsewhere in the world.
I mean, you can see this possibly with things like the Hopewell culture in America.
In North America, yeah.
Yeah. Where you have these, you know, lots of grave goods or lots of objects deposited after someone's dead. And, you know, the hypothesis is this is like a radioactive waste containment chamber sort of notion that these objects have power. or as one would say in the man-made world, nyama.
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