The Nok of Nigeria

Breunig and his colleague Nicole Rupp are leading a team of German and Nigerian researchers, students, and even former looters excavating sites over some 150 square miles in central Nigeria, about two hours’ drive north of the capital, Abuja. Their study area is but a microcosm of the Nok world, which covered more than 30,000 square miles, an area the size of Portugal.

On a black granite mountain towering over the savannah, Rupp and her team are digging neat trenches at the summit. Within minutes, they start to find pottery sherds, grinding stones, and fragments of red terracotta sculpture of the type first found by Fagg. Within an hour, the excavators have filled three big Ziploc bags with artifacts. Among them is a terracotta arm broken off of a larger statue. Its coarse, grainy surface and realistic modeling immediately identify it as distinctively Nok. In his classic survey of African art, Frank Willett wrote that the Nok created Africa’s earliest sculptural tradition outside of Egypt. Like their contemporaries, the soldier-builders of Xian, China, the Nok mastered the almost limitless sculptural possibilities of terracotta. With it they created figures depicting illness, warfare, love, and music. For example, Rupp and Breunig’s team has found a sculpture of a man and woman kneeling in front of each other, their arms wrapped around each other in a loving embrace, and also several bare-buttocked prisoners with ropes around their necks and waists. Another figure, which has a skull for a head and wears an amulet around his neck, is shaking two instruments resembling maracas. There is also a figure of a man with a wispy moustache, mouth open, as if in speech or song, and one of a man playing a drum resting between his legs, possibly the earliest depiction of musical performance in sub-Saharan Africa. At one site, Breunig and Rupp found 1,700 pieces of terracotta in barely 450 square yards, indicating a large population.

Despite the thematic variety, Nok terracotta has some characteristics that persist over hundreds of square miles and centuries of production. Figures almost always show large-headed people with almond-shaped eyes and parted lips. They often have grand headdresses or hairdos, which may indicate high status. A common pose, and one much imitated by forgers, shows a man sitting with his arms resting on his knees, gazing outward. Microscopic inspection of the clay used in the terracotta shows it to be remarkably uniform over the whole Nok area, suggesting that the clay came from a single, yet-undiscovered source. It could, says Breunig, support the idea of a unified Nok state or central authority of some kind.“The homogeneity of the clay used for terracotta might indicate centralized production. But other interpretations, including the concentration of skilled specialists, are no less probable at the moment,” says Breunig. “I think there was a set of respected, central rules that were enforced either through authorities, or through common beliefs, or both.”