The Making of an Internal Frontier Settlement: Archaeology and Historical Process in Osun Grove (Nigeria), Seventeenth to Eighteenth Centuries

Abstract

The historical, material, and spatial processes that defined the formative settlement practices in Early Osogbo (southwest Nigeria), a seventeenth- to early eighteenth-century frontier community, is the subject of this article. I use different datasets, including the spatial layout of the site, the archaeological depositional sequence, diverse artifact categories, and oral historical sources to engage Igor Kopytoff’s Internal African Frontier thesis. In this article, I argue against Kopytoff’s conceptualization of the frontier as a conservative space that relied on innovations from the metropolis. Instead, I demonstrate that Early Osogbo was a dynamic formative settlement in an internal Yoruba regional frontier whose material life was not a mere copy of a metropolis’s. Instead, this emerging community was characterized by diversity, complexity, experimentation, and newness that resulted from local forces of migration, frontier social networks, and regional exchange systems involving several spheres of interstitial frontiers and multiple metropolises. Contrary to the metropolis-frontier pattern of migration that informed Kopytoff’s Internal African Frontier thesis, Early Osogbo was originally created by frontier-frontier migrations before it became a site for intermetropolis contestation. The article underscores the need to bring conceptual clarity to the study of frontier processes, arguing that different historical contexts, migration patterns, and regional political frameworks produced different kinds of frontiers such as crossroads, boundary, colony, and cultural frontiers. The archaeological profile of Early Osogbo demonstrates that the settlement was a crossroads frontier community.