Message #234086

[Chausiku]

Little is understood about how Nok society ended. Sometime after A.D. 200, the once-thriving Nok population declined, as attested to by a sharp drop in the volume of pottery and terracotta in soil layers corresponding to those years. Overexploitation of natural resources and a heavy reliance on charcoal may have played a role, says Breunig.

Even more puzzling is Nok’s legacy to later cultures. Art historians have long seen Nok as an isolated phenomenon, a splendid relic cut off from the sequence of African art over the next two millennia. Later civilizations in southern Nigeria had advanced metalworking skills and a tradition of naturalistic portraiture, and art historians are looking more closely at what they might owe to Nok. The most celebrated of these later cultures was Ife (pronounced EE-feh), whose people in southwestern Nigeria turned bronze into stunning portrait heads around A.D. 1300.

“We would need more research to establish a stylistic continuum between Nok and Ife,” says Musa Hambolu, research director at Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments in Abuja. “To do this would require more detailed study of Nok sculptures because, for now, the evidence is very fragmentary.”

Bernard Fagg wrestled with this question—where did Nok culture come from, and where did it go? He wrote about the “striking similarities of style and subject matter” between Nok and Ife but acknowledged there was no proof the people of Ife had ever seen Nok terracottas. Now Breunig is trying to solve that riddle. “In the space of 1,000 years, West Africa moved from sedentary farming complexes like Nok to great empires, [such as Ife and Benin],” he says. “No society is completely isolated in time. That’s a story we’re starting to tell.”

Roger Atwood is a contributing editor to ARCHAEOLOGY. He currently lives in London.
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© 2011 by the Archaeological Institute of America
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