"The Sahel" means port or shore. Grassland between the Sahara and the Rainforest is called the Sahel. Sahel means port or shore in Arabic.

·         Sudan is the word for the entire band south of the Sahel. Central Sudan includes Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, South Sudan. 

·         4 characteristics of Nok style:

o   Most hollow, but in a carving rather than an additive style. May have coiled it then carved it like wood. Very finely made. Were they put in the river or did they fall in when the river expanded? Either way, most of them lost their bodies from the river.

o   1.) The treatment of the eyes, which form either a segment of a circle or sometimes a triangular form, with the eyebrow above balancing the sweep of the lower lip, sometimes making a circle or a lozenge.

o   2.) The piercing of the pupils, the nostrils, the lips and the ears.

o   3.) The careful representation of elaborate hairstyles, with complex constructions of buns, tresses, and locks and the profusion of beads around the neck, torso and waist.

o   4.) The naturalism in the modeling of the curled lips, the straight nose with flaring nostrils and the large overhanging forehead.

o   Ears usually in odd positions.

·         As early as 9^th Century BCE

·         As late as 250 CE

·         Most date 500 BCE to 250 CE.

  First finds were discovered at base of Kwatakwashi Hill. Very diverse appearance, sometimes eyes are not unlike that of the Nok culture. Many of the figures are somewhat conical in shape. Usually an indication of breasts or umbilicus. Necklaces.

·         In Niger, by the city of Niamey a number of Bura items were found.

o   Asinda-Sika is the name of the site, it is a cemetery dating 200 CE to 1000 CE. Fairly small site that contains thousands of vessel and sculptural objects.

§  Some of the pots were placed upside down and human teeth were found often at the bottom. They had pointy tops. Were they human heads, ancestral shrines, or enemies’ heads? 1-3’ tall. Suggestive of human form. Protrusion on the front, the umbilicus is often an outie, and this is suggestive of that. The abdomen is often decorated with scarification and that is comparable of these pots. Some have faces and heads on top. One was found with an equestrian form on the pot and a rider affixed on top wearing crossed baldricks.

o   Fairly small cemetery complex that lasted hundreds of years with lots of variation in style.

o   Also lots of stone objects, often abstracted human heads and necks.

Mostly hollow figures.

o   Term for mythical giants, pre-Islamic population.

o   Figural objects placed inside the context of vessels.

o   Many of them are of a very abstract style.

o   There’s a whole range of styles.

o   Changes of burial style signifying different groups of people moving in and out of the region.

o   Most have large, protruding lips and bulging eyes.

o   Cross-baldrick form and scarification.

o   Bura and Nok forms are hollow, these are solid.

o   Could have been fired as early as 900CE. Postdated Nok, maybe contemporaneous with Bura but far to the east. We don’t know when their production ceased.

o   Hairdos suggested but not to the detail of the Nok region.

o   Small objects with holes that might have been pendants. Hippos and crocodiles. And rams.

o   Beautiful vessels, found in the same context with beads heads pendants and everything else. Very adept at using clay.

o   Also a number of objects created using different metals. Using lost-wax process.

o   Other pendant forms found using those metals.

o   Figurative and decorative ceramic objects are no longer used by the residents of the Lake Chad region.

§  They do continue to be made in the rural region by people who have not converted to Islam.

o   Live NW of the region known as the plateau region, downriver from Bura cemetery, north of the Nok diagonal, west of the Sao culture.

o   Seem to have migrated from lands further north and west.

o   Current culture.

o   What look like old-fashioned wells are seen in an early 20^th century photo. They are clay walls about 3’ in diameter and up to a yard high. Some seem to be filled with soil, and figures are in them.

o   Most of these have somewhat spherical lower portions with a figure standing atop it.

o   Seem to have been used in a burial context.

o   Graves of outstanding men, they have a distinguishing form associated with them. Well-known people were chosen to be marked with these remarkable objects in their graves.

o   Could be a human figure or an abstract figure marking it.

o   Other objects more like everyday vessels were also used.

o   Referred to as sons of the grave by early 20^th century researchers.

o   In 1940 a Brit named Fitzgerald conducted a survey of numbers of graves in the region. He noted many were marked with outstanding pottery goods. Noted there didn’t seem to be a great deal of care given to the graves. Some found in deserted villages and the ones in active villages were sometimes broken with no effort to fix. Believes in the past this was the most common type and they used to be much larger.

·         Benue, Gongola – things we must locate.

·         The terrain in the area we are looking at is dominated by the Gongola River and there is a rugged terrain.

·         Ga’anda is on the shoulders of the “chicken” that is Cameroon, and carries over into Cameroon.

·         The Kanuri- Lived in the area, had an empire.

·         The Fulani- Lived in the area, conquered the nomadic people and ruled over them.

·         Mosaic of little acephalous cultures that lived in the area. They have a big culture of scarification, etc.

·         Musgum- People that used to build remarkable type of architecture by building their houses, furnaces and graneries out of model earth. Very carefully made extra large vessels.

o   The best recognized of these beautiful clay homes were built by the Musgum and their neighbors in the Mandara Mtns in SW Chad and N Cameroon.