New Terracotta Finds at Oko-Eso, Ife

Abstract

Casual or accidental finds are not new to the archaeology of Ife. The thirteen brass heads that brought Ife art to world notice were discovered by a bricklayer at Wunmonije Compound in 1938. In early November 1974, while the grave of Thomas Olatunji was being dug at 52, Oke-Eso Compound, the terracotta sculptures of two figures, a male and a female, were found. They were crushed into pieces. Before the news was brought to me the following day, the fragments had been removed from the site, the corpse buried and the grave sealed. It is therefore impossible to recover the fragments that might have been buried with the dead man, as well as to determine the positions of the pieces and their stratigraphic origin. The find consists of a torso (Fig. 1), an almost complete male head (Fig. 3), a portion of a female head (Fig. 2), a ram head (Fig. 4), an arm (Fig. 6), a hand (Fig. 7), and a fragment depicting gourds and cowrie shells (Fig. 5). Except for the male head and ram head, all of the pieces are glazed with red paint, indicating that these should be grouped together as fragments of a female figure. The two human heads seem to belong to the Ife corpus of naturalistic rather than stylized terracottas, the male resembling the well-known Lajuwa head (Willett 1967, pl. 11) in style an technique. Both heads have long incisions on the cheeks to represent facial markings. It is not exactly certain when these were first employed. Oral traditions collected in Ife suggest that they were originally used to differentiate families, especially during periods of war. Later, these war became a permanent indication of group identity. Yet they are not tribal marks as some authorities believe (Nadel 1942, pp. 69-70), for within the Yoruba there are over 22 such (Johnson 1957, pp. 104-105); within Ife alone there are about three. These designs, therefore, are more an identification for descendants of one