Igbo-Ukwu bronzes

In 1938 a man named Isaiah Anozie, digging a cistern at his compound in Igbo-Ukwu in southeastern Nigeria, struck buried bronze objects. Excavations by the archaeologist Thurstan Shaw in 1959 to 1960 and 1964 at three sites uncovered more than 700 copper-alloy objects and over 165,000 glass and stone beads. They included ritual vessels, a bronze pot wrapped in imitation rope, ornaments shaped like shells and insects, and the furnished burial of a high-status person, possibly a ritual ruler. Shaw's radiocarbon dates pointed to around the 9th to 10th century CE, though some recent studies argue for a later range.²³

The castings use the lost-wax method, in which a wax model is coated in clay, the wax melted out and molten metal poured in, and they show extraordinary fine detail. Analysis shows most of the metal came from copper, and probably lead, ores around Abakaliki, about 100 km away, not from imports, drawing on West Africa's long tradition of metalworking that began with iron smelting. Many glass beads, by contrast, came from far away, probably from the Middle East or beyond, which means Igbo-Ukwu was tied into trade networks that crossed the Sahara or reached the Indian Ocean. The finds reshaped ideas about early states and craft specialization in the West African forest zone.¹²³