<< Our Photo Pages >> Taruga - Ancient Village or Settlement in Nigeria

Submitted by Andy B on Sunday, 06 November 2011  Page Views: 14312

DigsSite Name: Taruga Alternative Name: Samun Dukiya (nearby site)
Country: Nigeria Type: Ancient Village or Settlement

Latitude: 9.500000N  Longitude: 8.000000E
Condition:
5Perfect
4Almost Perfect
3Reasonable but with some damage
2Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site
1Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks
0No data.
-1Completely destroyed
 no data Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
 no data Access:
5Can be driven to, probably with disabled access
4Short walk on a footpath
3Requiring a bit more of a walk
2A long walk
1In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find
0No data.
 no data Accuracy:
5co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates
4co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map
3co-ordinates scaled from a bad map
2co-ordinates of the nearest village
1co-ordinates of the nearest town
0no data
 1
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Taruga
Taruga submitted by Andy B : Nok sculpture of character laying chin on knee. Terracotta, 6th century BC–6th century AD, Nigeria. Public domain photograph Photographer: Jastrow (2006) (Vote or comment on this photo)
Taruga is an archeological site in Nigeria famous for the artifacts of the Nok culture that have been discovered there, some dating to 600 BC, and for evidence of very early iron working. The site is 60 km southeast of Abuja, in the Middle Belt.

Iron use, in smelting and forging for tools, appears in Nok culture in Africa at least by 550 BC and more probably in the middle of the second millennium BC (between 1400 BC and 1600 BC depending on references)

Taruga is just one of the sites in central Nigeria where artifacts from the Nok culture have been excavated. Since 1945, similar figurines and pottery have been found in many other locations in the area, often uncovered accidentally by modern tin miners, and dating from before 500 BC to 200 AD. The region was probably moister and more heavily wooded during this period than it is today, but was still north of the zone of dense forests. The people would have subsisted by farming and cattle raising. As the climate gradually became drier, they would have drifted south, so the Nok people may have been the ancestors of people such as the Igala, Nupe, Yoruba and Ibo, whose artwork shows similarities to the earlier Nok artifacts.

As of October 2007, the Federal Government was being asked to protect and rehabilitate the site in view of its tourist potential. However, the site was threatened by illegal miners looking to develop the mineral resources.

Samun Dukiya

Samun Dukiya is a second archeological site in the Nok valley where artifacts from the Nok culture have been found, dating to between 300 BC and 100 BC.

Radio-carbon dating indicates that the site was occupied between 2500 and 2000 years ago. No traces of occupation before the Iron age have been found. The site contained broken pottery, iron and other artifacts, and fragments of terracotta statues which may have been used in shrines.

Read more at Wikipedia, articles on Taruba and the Nok culture.
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Petróglifos do Outeiro da Tartaruga
Petróglifos do Outeiro da Tartaruga submitted by Flickr : Outeiro da tartaruga, Samieira, Poio. Site in Galicia Spain Image copyright: Antonio Costa (Antonio Costa), hosted on Flickr and displayed under the terms of their API. (Vote or comment on this photo)

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"Taruga" | Login/Create an Account | 2 News and Comments
  
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Unlocking the secrets of West Africa’s earliest known civilization, the Nok by Andy B on Sunday, 06 November 2011
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In 1943, British archaeologist Bernard Fagg received a visitor in the central Nigerian town of Jos, where he had spent the previous few years gathering and classifying ancient artifacts found on a rugged plateau. The visitor carried a terracotta head that, he said, had been perched atop a scarecrow in a nearby yam field. Fagg was intrigued. The piece resembled a terracotta monkey head he had seen a few years earlier, and neither piece matched the artifacts of any known ancient African civilization.

Fagg, a man of boundless curiosity and energy, traveled across central Nigeria looking for similar artifacts. As he recounted later, Fagg discovered local people had been finding terracottas in odd places for years—buried under a hockey field, perched on a rocky hilltop, protruding from piles of gravel released by power-hoses in tin mining. He set up shop in a whitewashed cottage that still stands outside the village of Nok and soon gathered nearly 200 terracottas through purchase, persuasion, and his own excavations. Soil analysis from the spots where the artifacts were found dated them to around 500 B.C. This seemed impossible since the type of complex societies that would have produced such works were not supposed to have existed in West Africa that early.

But when Fagg subjected plant matter found embedded in the terracotta to the then-new technique of radiocarbon dating, the dates ranged from 440 B.C. to A.D. 200. He later dated the scarecrow head—now called the Jemaa Head after the village where it was found—to about 500 B.C. using a process called thermoluminescence which gauges the time since baked clay was fired. Through a combination of luck, legwork, and new dating techniques, Fagg and his collaborators had apparently discovered a hitherto unknown civilization, which he named Nok.

One excavation site, near the village of Taruga, revealed something else Fagg had not expected: iron furnaces. He found 13 such furnaces, and terracotta figurines were in such close association—inside the furnaces and around them—that he postulated the terracottas were objects of worship to aid blacksmithing and smelting. Carbon dating of charcoal inside the furnaces revealed dates as far back as 280 B.C., giving Nok the earliest dates for iron smelting in sub-Saharan Africa up to that time. The high number of smelters and quantity of terracottas suggested he had found evidence of a dense, settled population.

Read more in Archaeology Magazine
http://www.archaeology.org/1107/features/nok_nigeria_africa_terracotta.html

(with thanks to Coldrum for the news item)
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Exploring the Nok enigma by Andy B on Sunday, 06 November 2011
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Some 2,500 years ago, a mysterious culture emerged in Nigeria. The Nok people left behind bizarre terracotta statues - and little else. German archaeologists are looking for more clues to explain this obscure culture.

More at
http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=2146413734

Exploring the Nok enigma

The Nok culture of central Nigeria is well known for its terracotta figurines and represents the first sculptural tradition in Sub-Saharan Africa. Nok plays also a prominent role in the emergence of iron technology, providing some of the earliest evidence of iron smelting in West Africa around 500 BC as demonstrated by excavations in Taruga. In contrast to its scientific importance, Nok remained an enigma for a long time, since little archaeological fieldwork has been devoted to the Nok culture, and, until now, little is known about the creators of those impressive works of art. Few excavations were carried out in the 1960s, and results remained unpublished except for Taruga.

http://antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/kahlheber/
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