The Practice of Archaeology in Nigeria

Abstract

This chapter presents a brief summary of the historical development of archaeology in Nigeria from the first digs at Ile Ife in 1910 by the German anthropologist Leo Frobenius, who searched for buried terracotta figurines, to the accidental discovery of the first piece of what have become known as the Nok terracotta figurines in tin mines on the Jos Plateau in 1928 and finds of archaeological materials in the course of digging foundations in Benin, Ife and Igbo-Ukwu in 1938. Also discussed is the evolution of archaeology from rescue/salvage beginnings to its present purely academic character that had adversely affected its growth. The division of archaeology into academic and non-academic in Nigeria is reviewed to show the inherent problems in such structure, while academic archaeology is shown to be treated differently in universities as it is housed either in the Faculty of Arts or Faculty of Science. The basic theoretical driving force for later archaeologists in Nigeria, as elsewhere in West Africa, had been the deconstruction of the European imposed theories of evolution, migration and diffusion as they affected the interpretation of the African past. In recent studies, emphasis had been on cultural history of some Nigerian people using historical archaeology and ethnoarchaeology.