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Archaeology of Igbo-Ukwu
The archaeology of Igbo-Ukwu revealed bronze artifacts dated to the 9th century A.D. which were initially discovered by Isiah Anozie in 1939 while digging a well in his compound in Igbo-Ukwu, an Igbo town in Anambra State, Nigeria. As a result of these finds, three archaeological sites were excavated in 1959 and 1964 by Thurstan Shaw which revealed more than 700 high quality artifacts of copper, bronze and iron, as well as about 165000 glass, carnelian and stone beads, pottery, textiles and ivory. They are the oldest bronze artifacts known in West African and were manufactured centuries before the emergence of other known bronze producing centers such as those of Ife and Benin. The bronzes include numerous ritual vessels, pendants, crowns, breastplates, staff ornaments, swords, and fly-whisk handles.
The Igbo-Ukwu bronzes amazed the world with a very high level of technical and artistic proficiency and sophistication which was at this time distinctly more advanced than bronze casting in Europe. Peter Garlake compares the Igbo-Ukwu bronzes "to the finest jewelry of rococo Europe or of Carl Faberge," and William Buller Fagg states they were created with "a strange rococo almost Faberge type virtuosity." Frank Willett says that the Igbo-Ukwu bronzes portray a standard that is comparable to that established by Benvenuto Cellini five hundred years later in Europe. Denis Williams calls them "an exquisite explosion without antecedent or issue." One of the objects found, a water pot set in a mesh of simulated rope is described by Hugh Honour and John Fleming as
The high technical proficiency and lack of known prototypes of the Igbo-Ukwu bronzes led to initial speculation in the academic community that they must have been created after European contact and phantom voyagers were postulated. However research and isotope analysis has established that the source of the metals is of local origin and radio carbon dating has confirmed a 9th-century date, long before the earliest contact with Europe. The Igbo-Ukwu artifacts did away with the hitherto existing colonial era opinions in archeological circles that such magnificent works of art and technical proficiency could only originate in areas with contact to the outside world, or that they could not be crafted in an acephalous or egalitarian society such as that of the Igbo.〔 Some of the glass and carnelian beads have been found to be produced in Old Cairo at the workshops of Fustat thus establishing that trade contacts did exist between Igbo-Ukwu and ancient Egypt. Archaeological sites containing iron smelting furnaces and slag have been excavated dating to 2000BC in Lejja and 750BC in Opi both in Nsukka region about 100 Kilometers east of Igbo-Ukwu.
== History ==
The initial finds were made by Isiah Anozie while digging in his compound in 1939. He was not aware of the significance of the objects he had found and gave away some of them to friends and neighbors, as well as using some of the vessels to water his goats. J.O. Field, the British colonial district officer of the area later learned of the finds and was able to purchase many of them, publishing the find in an anthropological journal. He later handed over the artefacts to the Nigerian department of antiquity. Curiously Mr. Field noted at the time that Subsequent research was to prove him wrong. Twenty years later, in 1959 and again in 1964 Thurstan Shaw and his team excavated three sites around the original find for the Nigerian department of antiquity and later for the University of Ibadan. The archaeological digs revealed hundreds of copper and bronze ritual vessels as well as iron swords, iron spear heads, iron razors and other artifacts dated a millennium earlier.
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