Nok Art: Echoes of Ancient Nigeria

Long before newspapers called anything “ancient,” a people in what is now central Nigeria taught clay

to remember faces. We call them the Nok — after a modern village where terracotta heads surfaced in

the 20th century — but their civilization flourished more than two thousand years earlier.

Their sculptures look at us with almond-shaped eyes and quiet questions. The Nok lived along

the Jos Plateau and surrounding country, in villages that worked the land

and the furnace. Archaeology shows furnaces and slag — evidence that the Nok were among

sub-Saharan Africa’s early ironworkers. To smelt is to organize: ore, fuel,

heat, air, timing. A furnace is a classroom; a community that