ABSTRACT
From the upper parts of the Niger River to those of the Congo River, there is a huge area of tropical Africa in which some of the most powerful evidence from the past consists of art in the form of sculpture. Most common amongst this material are wood carvings, of which for climatic reasons the surviving examples are only a century or two old, but fortunately in some areas there are also items of fired clay, of metal, and of stone that have survived much longer. This is particularly the case in the modern state of Nigeria, where there is a remarkable amount and variety of sculptured art, some of which is over 2000 years old. Two of the most important later examples of this are from Igbo-Ukwu (Chapter 19) and Benin City (Chapter 21) but there are many others. Much of this material is representational, depicting animals or human beings, in the latter case literally providing us with faces from the past. Some of these seem to have been of deities but others were probably of rulers and other people in the societies that produced the sculptures. Consequently, these works of art are a potential source of information on religious, political, social, economic and technological matters, as well as on artistic style and the way people saw their world. However, to realize that potential it is necessary to investigate also the archaeological context of the art and sometimes this has not had enough attention.
