Project description
Metalworking traditions in Nigeria’s past
There is evidence of intense metalworking traditions with the emergence of social complexity in Nigeria between 700 BC and 1800 AD. The EU-funded METALS project will investigate the metallurgical traditions in West Africa, targeting the technology, production and exchange of copper in Nigeria in this time period. The project will identify the metallurgical traditions in early Nigeria concerning technological processes and development as well as raw material selections. METALS will also reveal the interactions of prehistoric craftspeople with the broader region in terms of managing copper production and consumption through the social network system. The project will work on museum materials, deliver training at the host institute in Cyprus, and conduct targeted fieldwork in southern Nigeria.
Objective
METALS aims to explore the Metallurgical Traditions in West Africa with emphasis on the Technology, Production, and Exchange of Copper in Nigeria from 700 BC to AD 1800. This period is significant in Nigeria’s past due to evidence of intense metalworking traditions with emergence of social complexity. There are two questions central to this project: first, what was the evolution of metallurgical traditions in early Nigeria in relation to technical processes and development and raw material choices? Second, how did prehistoric craftspeople in Nigeria interact with the wider region in terms of navigating production and consumption of copper and its alloys through the social network system? METALS will prioritize copper metallurgy as the more elusive technology, but will consider iron metallurgy equally alongside the copper research, not least to lay the foundation for a follow-on project proposal targeting Nigeria’s early iron metallurgy. The project will select materials from collections of museums both in Nigeria and Europe, while training-through-research will take place on an existing assemblage at the Host institute from a site in Morocco for an in-depth study on metallurgical production and development. The Nigerian museum assemblages will be complemented by materials from targeted archaeological fieldwork at areas of prime potential in southern Nigeria. Optical microscopy, handheld X-ray Fluorescence, SEM-EDS, and lead isotope analysis will be used to reconstruct the mineralogical and compositional constituent the metal and the chaîne opératoire of their production. METALS is designed as an interdisciplinary project that integrate material science, archaeology, anthropology, geochemistry, museum studies, anthropological theory and African/global history. This project will significantly expand knowledge of Africa’s contributions to metallurgy in global perspectives, and construct an open access online database of elemental composition of early metal objects.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
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Keywords
Programme(s)
Topic(s)
Call for proposal
(opens in new window) H2020-WF-2018-2020
See other projects for this callSub call
H2020-WF-03-2020
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
2121 Nicosia
Cyprus