How it began
Igbo-Ukwu is an Igbo town in Anambra State, southeastern Nigeria. Its bronzes were made by local metalworkers and are commonly dated to the 9th century on the radiocarbon dates published by the archaeologist Thurstan Shaw in 1970. Studies published in 2022 dated material from one of the three sites to between the 10th and 13th centuries, so some pieces may be somewhat younger. All of them predate European contact on the coast by several centuries.
How it works
The objects were cast by the lost-wax method, in which a wax model is coated in clay, the wax is melted out and molten metal takes its place. The best-known piece is a water pot enclosed in a mesh of imitation rope, all in metal. Art historians have called it a virtuoso feat of lost-wax casting, more advanced in technique than European bronze casting of the same period.
What changed first
Excavation produced more than 700 objects of copper, bronze and iron, including ritual vessels, pendants, crowns, breastplates, staff ornaments and fly-whisk handles, together with about 165,000 beads of glass, carnelian and stone. The scale and finish of the work point to specialist craftspeople.
What lasted
The bronzes are the oldest known in Nigeria. Scholars have compared them with fine European jewelry of much later centuries. The historian Denis Williams called them "an exquisite explosion without antecedent or issue", since no earlier or later local tradition of the same kind is known.
Where it stands today
Isaiah Anozie found the first pieces in 1938 while digging in his compound. Shaw excavated three areas between 1959 and 1964. The objects are divided among the National Museum in Lagos, the University of Ibadan and the British Museum, and none are in Igbo-Ukwu. In 2024 Factum Foundation trained community members to scan bronzes in Lagos so that facsimiles could be made for the town.
