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Nok - African Sculpture in Archaeological Context (Paperback)
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Nok - African Sculpture in Archaeological Context (Paperback)
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This book provides insights into the archaeological context of the
Nok Culture in Nigeria (West Africa). It was first published in
German accompanying the same-titled exhibition "Nok - Ein Ursprung
afrikanischer Skulptur" at the Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung in
Frankfurt (30th October 2013 - 23rd March 2014) and has now been
translated into English. A team of archaeologists from the Goethe
University Frankfurt/Main has been researching the Nok Culture
since 2005. The results are now presented to the public. The Nok
Culture existed for about 1500 years - from around the mid-second
millennium BCE to the turn of the Common Era. It is mainly known by
the elaborate terracotta sculptures which were likewise the focus
of the exhibition. The research of the archaeologists from
Frankfurt, however, not only concerns the terracotta figures. They
investigate the Nok Culture from a holistic perspective and put it
into the larger context of the search for universal developments in
the history of mankind. Such a development - important because it
initiated a new era of the past - is the transition from small
groups of hunters and gatherers to large communities with complex
forms of human co-existence. This process took place almost
everywhere in the world in the last 10,000 years, although in very
different ways. The Nok Culture represents an African variant of
that process. It belongs to a group of archaeological cultures or
human groups, who in part subsisted on the crops they were growing
and lived in mostly small but permanent settlements in the savanna
regions south of the Sahara from the second millennium BCE onwards.
The discovery of metallurgy is the next turning point in the
development of the first farming cultures. In Africa the first
metal used was not copper or bronze as in the Near East and Europe,
but iron. The people of the Nok Culture were among the first that
produced iron south of the Sahara. This happened in the first
millennium BCE - about 1000 years after the agricultural beginning.
While iron metallurgy spread rapidly across sub-Saharan Africa, the
terracotta sculptures remained a cultural monopoly of the Nok
Culture. Nothing comparable existed in Africa outside of Ancient
Egypt and the Mediterranean coast. The oldest, securely dated clay
figures date back to the early first millennium BCE. Currently, it
seems as if they appeared in the Nok Culture before iron
metallurgy, reaching their peak in the following centuries. At the
end of the first millennium BCE they disappeared from the scene.
There is hardly any doubt about the ritual character of the Nok
sculptures. Yet, central questions remain unanswered: Why did such
an apparently complex world of ritual practices develop in an early
farming culture just before or at the beginning of the momentous
invention of iron production? Why were the elaborate sculptures -
as excavations show - intentionally destroyed? And why did they
disappear as suddenly as they emerged?
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