The Nok of Nigeria

Thus, in short order, Fagg had discovered some of the key markers of an advanced civilization: refined art and organized worship, metal smelting, and sufficient population to support these activities. But he knew such a society did not appear in isolation. Fagg, now back at Oxford University in England, wrote that Nok culture had almost certainly begun earlier and survived longer than he had evidence for at the time. “It was the product of a mature tradition,” he wrote, “with the probability of a long antecedent history, of which as yet, no trace has been found.”

After 40 years of doing little archaeological exploration in the area, scholars are now returning to the scrubby, hilly lands where Fagg worked and are finding that, indeed, the Nok thrived for longer than he had realized. They may have been the first complex civilization in West Africa, existing from at least 900 B.C. to about A.D. 200. Their terracottas are now some of the most iconic ancient objects from Africa. And they may be the first society in Africa south of the Sahara to smelt iron, although at least half a dozen competitors for that title have surfaced since Fagg first excavated a Nok furnace.

Nigeria has a reputation for chaos, corruption, and expensive visas that has kept archaeologists away and drastically slowed the pace of research. In 1959, anthropologist George Murdock quipped that for every ton of earth moved by archaeologists on the Nile, a teaspoon is moved on the Niger. Scholarship has also been hampered by an almost 40-year campaign of looting at Nok sites fed by the growing appetite for African antiquities among collectors in the United States and Europe.

“No one continued with the work of Bernard Fagg. Instead of scientific exploration, the Nok became a victim of illegal digging and international art dealers,” says Peter Breunig, of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. Looting tapered off after about 2005 because of tighter export restrictions and a glut of fakes that frightened off collectors. Now, interest in Iron Age societies in Africa is surging as archaeologists contemplate a wide-open field that could hold essential insights into how technologies—especially iron—spread across continents.