ABSTRACT
The “Lower Niger Bronze Industry” was William Fagg’s intentionally open-ended label that he hoped would soon be eliminated by further art historical and archaeological research on southern Nigerian copper-alloy works. Fagg’s initial label was not simply an exercise in taxonomy, but a serious esthetic decision on his part to exclude a number of striking cast-metal pieces from the main Benin corpus. Unfortunately, linguists cannot be specific as to dates of origin and/or divergences of southern Nigerian languages. The density of different languages among southern Nigerian peoples reflects their antiquity, diverse migrations, and ethnic fluidity. Manillas and elaborated manillas are found everywhere in southern Nigeria. “Nigerian material culture is replete with skeumorphs–objects made of one substance and reproduced in other media–in a hierarchy that sets bronze and ivory at the top”.
