Nok is a village in Jaba Local Government Area of

Kaduna State Kaduna (, جىِهَر كَدُنا; مدينة كدونا; , ; ) is a States of Nigeria, state in the northwest geopolitical zone of Nigeria. The state capital is its namesake, the city of Kaduna (city), Kaduna, which was the List of Nigerian ...

Nigeria Nigeria, officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a country in West Africa. It is situated between the Sahel to the north and the Gulf of Guinea in the Atlantic Ocean to the south. It covers an area of . With Demographics of Nigeria, ...

. The village is an

archeological site An archaeological site is a place (or group of physical sites) in which evidence of past activity is preserved (either prehistoric or historic or contemporary), and which has been, or may be, investigated using the discipline of archaeology an ...

Archaeology

The discovery of terracotta figurines at this location caused its name to be used for the

Nok culture The Nok culture is a population whose material remains are named after the Ham people, Ham village of Nok in Southern Kaduna, southern Kaduna State of Nigeria, where their terracotta sculptures were first discovered in 1928. The Nok people and ...

, of which these figurines are typical, which flourished in Nigeria in the period 1500 BC - 500 AD.Breunig, Peter. 2014. Nok: African Sculpture in Archaeological Context: p. 21. The artifacts were discovered in 1943 during mining operations. The archaeologist

Bernard Fagg Bernard Evelyn Buller Fagg MBE, (8 December 1915 – 14 August 1987) was a British archaeologist and museum curator who undertook extensive work in Nigeria before and after the Second World War. Biography Fagg was born in Upper Norwood to ...

investigated the site, and with the help of locals discovered many other artifacts. Iron smelting furnaces were also found at Nok. A sample of carbonized wood found in the "main paddock" at Nok in 1951 was dated to around 3660 BC which dates far before the first iron smelting, though there are questions about the reliability of this conclusion. Nok is seen as peculiar due to the discovery of both stone and iron tools found in the archeological site but no copper tools. It is believed that Nok culture along with all of

Sub-Saharan Africa Sub-Saharan Africa is the area and regions of the continent of Africa that lie south of the Sahara. These include Central Africa, East Africa, Southern Africa, and West Africa. Geopolitically, in addition to the list of sovereign states and ...

skipped the copper age, suggesting that they made the leap from the Stone age to the

Iron Age The Iron Age () is the final epoch of the three historical Metal Ages, after the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age. It has also been considered as the final age of the three-age division starting with prehistory (before recorded history) and progre ...

. The reason for this is because the use of copper metallurgy has been dated to around 2000 BC and iron metallurgy at around 2136–1921 BC making the use of these metals predate many areas in the world which supports the independent expansion of this technology in Sub-Saharan Africa.Miller, Duncan E., and Nikolaas J. Van Der Merwe
“Early Metal Working in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Review of Recent Research.” ''The Journal of African History''
35.1 (1994): 1–36. Web.

References

External links

{{Authority control Jaba Archaeological sites in Nigeria Populated places in Kaduna State Sacred sites in traditional African religions Archaeological sites of Western Africa