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Ife connecté : un empire ouest-africain dans le Moyen-Âge mondialisé/ Ife connected : A West African empire in the Global Middle-Ages

Seminar organized by Gérard Chouin, Léa Roth and Amanda Logan, from February, 24th – March 1st, 2025.

 

Participants

Gérard CHOUIN (The College of William & Mary – Williamsburg, États-Unis), Amanda LOGAN (Northwestern University  – Evanston, États-Unis), Léa ROTH (Villa I Tatti – The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies – Fiesole, Italie), Osuolale Joseph AYODOKUN (University of Ibadan  – Ibadan, Nigéria), Stanley NWOSU (University of Pittsburgh  – Pittsburgh , États-Unis), Sharon Ifeoma NWORGU (National commission for museums and monuments  – Lagos, Nigéria), Tomos EVANS (Washington University in St. Louis – St. Louis, États-Unis), Carole ACQUAVIVA (indépendante – Verdun-sur-Garonne, France), Cécile CHAPELAIN DE SEREVILLE-NIEL (CRAHAM – UMR 6273 CNRS-Université Caen Normandie – Caen, France), Benjamin Adisa OGUNFOLAKAN (Obafemi Awolwo University – Ile-Ife, Osun State, Nigéria), Oluwadamilare OMOGBAI (Wessex Archaeology – Salisbury, Royaume-Uni), Luca TROMBINO (Université de Milan – Département de Sciences de la Terre – Milan, Italie), Neil NORMAN (The College of William & Mary – Williamsburg, États-Unis), Bertrand POISSONNIER (Inrap – Paris, France), Bailey WARD (The Metropolitan Museum of Art – New York, États-Unis)

Abstract

A total of sixteen researchers affiliated with the Ife-Sungbo Archaeological Project (Mission Archéologique d’Ife-Sungbo) participated in an interdisciplinary seminar at the Fondation des Treilles to work on a first edited volume presenting data on the archaeology of Ife, a major medieval city that flourished in the Gulf of Guinea between the 11th and the 14th century CE. Twelve thematic presentations were discussed by 11 senior and 5 junior scholars including practicing archaeologists, scientists, and conservators.  The goal was to restructure and outline the forthcoming volume, focusing on key findings that have emerged from ten years of archaeological research. By the end of the seminar, the team produced a balanced and thoroughly revised outline that presents findings on the chronology, spatial organization and connectedness with the Global medieval world in innovative ways.

Résumé

Une équipe de seize chercheurs associés à la mission archéologique d’Ife-Sungbo (Ife-Sungbo Archaeological Project) ont participé à un séminaire interdisciplinaire à la Fondation des Treilles pour travailler sur le premier volume collectif où seront présentées les données sur l’archéologie d’Ife, une cité médiévale qui prospéra entre le 11ème et le 14èmesiècle de notre ère. Douze présentations thématiques ont fait l’objet de discussions associant 11 chercheurs et professionnels senior et 5 junior pour aboutir à la réorganisation du contenu de l’ouvrage autour des points essentiels qui ont émergé suite à 10 années de recherche archéologique. A la fin du séminaire, la structure renouvelée du projet d’ouvrage présente de manière innovante les données des fouilles sur la chronologie, l’organisation spatiale et les connexions tissées par Ife avec d’autres régions du Moyen-Âge global.

Report

From February 24 to March 1, 2025, the Fondation des Treilles welcomed a team of fourteen researchers residing in Africa, Europe, and the USA to discuss ten years of archaeological research on the medieval urban center of Ile-Ife, Nigeria. Two additional colleagues joined remotely. We took full advantage of this stay to share our perspectives, debate possible themes and foci, and develop the final structure of the first edited volume on the archaeology of medieval Ife, to be published in 2026. We made significant progress, including restructuring the volume and its goals, and confirming each scholar’s role as volume editors, subject editors, thematic coordinators, and chapter contributors.

Since 2015, the Ife-Sungbo Archaeological Project has revisited the archaeological record of the medieval urban site of Ife, located underneath the modern city of Ile-Ife, in Osun State, Nigeria. Supported by the French Ministry of Europe and International Affairs, Gérard Chouin and Adisa Ogunfolakan have co-directed the project, and invited the participation of many scholars from Nigerian, European, and North American universities.

Ife is famous for a number of bronze heads and other outstanding artifacts recovered during the first half of the twentieth century. These discoveries changed the perception of African art in the Western World, and prompted many archaeological digs starting in the 1940s. The search for new material evidence made Ife one of the most excavated sites in sub-Saharan Africa. Remarkably, most archaeological excavations were never published, and their findings – when preserved – ended up in a variety of archives, storerooms, and private holdings scattered across three continents. Altogether, these archaeological studies contributed little to our understanding of the past development and decline of this large medieval town, resulting in Ife being thought of as marginal compared to better-documented empires in the Sahel, North Eastern Africa, Europe and Asia. For the past 10 years, the Ife-Sungbo Archaeological Project has conducted a series of new archaeological and archival investigations to recover fragments of this lost history, and reframe Ife’s role in the global Middle Ages.

Each of the four days of the seminar was divided into three periods of 2 hours. Each period had a presentation by single participants and teams of participants, followed by group brainstorming activities and a round-table discussion. Each presentation coincided with a theme listed in a preliminary outline : 1. Colonial and postcolonial historiography of Ife, 2. Strategies and excavation practices in urban tropical environments, 3. An Archaeology of Ita Yemoo, 4. An Archaeology of Oduduwa College II, 5. An archaeology of Oke Atan and the problem of earthworks, 6. An archaeology of Lujumo Compound, 7. Medieval pavements and their conservation, 8. Evidence of foodways, craft and trade at Ife, 9. Ife glass recipes, history and meaning, 10. New perspectives on Ife history through geosciences, 11. Ife pottery, from style to petrology, 12. Ife in its regional setting. The interdisciplinary nature of the seminar is worth noting in the presence and/or intervention of several archaeologists and historians, but also two geologists (one soil specialist and one ceramologist), a physicist, an archaeobotanist and a conservator, reflecting the broad array of skills brought together to explore Ife’s past.

Presentations and discussions enabled the team to substantially restructure the outline initially proposed by Gérard Chouin, Amanda Logan, and Léa Roth, general editors of the volume in preparation. We adopted a structure divided into 5 thematic parts that does better than the initial outline in bringing forward the essential findings of the projects in a variety of key themes, while promoting intertextuality between the different parts and chapters. The idea is to publish a coherent first book on the archaeology of Ife, rather than a collection of individual essays.

The first series of presentations focused on theoretical and methodological challenges of working at Ile-Ife, in a very complex, over-excavated, urban and tropical setting. Tomos Evans proposed a critical historiography of excavations at Ife from the precolonial to the postcolonial periods. Then, Sharon Nworgu and Stanley Nwosu focused on the challenges of working in a large urban tropical milieu in West Africa, and presented the strategies adopted by the Ife-Sungbo Archaeological Project to circumvent them.

Next, Neil Norman, Adisa Ogunfolakan and Gérard Chouin moved on to the archaeology of earthworks at Ile-Ife. One of the major findings of the Ife-Sungbo Archaeological Project is that Ife’s banks-and-ditch system, long thought to be of medieval origins, were indeed post-medieval and constructed as recently as the 19th century. These findings challenge long-held beliefs about the structure and purpose of medieval cities more broadly. We reflected on the origin of the medievalist discourse around the earthworks, and discussed the updated chronology of the city walls, while exploring their physicality and materiality.

Another point of interest concerns features that structured space in medieval Ife. We presented and discussed data-heavy material on 1. potsherd and stone pavements that are the most spatially-relevant infrastructure left behind by the inhabitants of medieval Ife (Léa Roth and Carole Acquaviva), 2. deep pits that structure medieval Ife’s underground landscape, 3. ubiquitous but elusive traces of built architecture, 4. medieval and post-medieval soils that encapsulate physical and chemical traces of past events and practices (Luca Trombino).

The making of cosmopolitan urban tastes and material culture at Ife offers an unique window on ways Ife got connected with its close and long-range environment. Here, we reviewed tantalizing evidence on 1. foodways based on a very intensive campaign of sampling for botanical remains (Amanda Logan), 2. local industrial production of glass beads (Laure Dussubieux and Bailey Ward) and 3. assemblages of local ceramics studied from stylistic and petrological approaches.

Finally, we recounted a number of community engagements that took place in the framework of the Ife-Sungbo Archaeological Project, including 1. a workshop on the conservation of potsherd pavements, 2. the mapping of surviving medieval pavements relying on an mix of technology-heavy approach and community engagement, 3. the building of a new interpretation center over excavated potsherd pavements at Ita Yemoo (Osuoale Joseph Ayodokun).

In conclusion, With Oluwadamilare Omogbai, we reviewed a series of concording evidence of connectedness between Ife and Sahelian nodes involved in the trans-Saharan trade.

Collective time was crucial to bring together scholars working in Africa, USA and Europe to brainstorm, reach to a consensual outline of the edited volume that will come out of this seminar, share responsibilities and agree on a timeline. In particular, our shared time together enabled us to come to broader, more significant conclusions than working with our datasets in isolation. As a result, this volume will find broader interdisciplinary significance in connecting Ife to the global Middle Ages and an expanded readership.

Lien vers la vidéo de présentation du séminaire sur YouTube.  


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
ldiebold (14 mars 2025). Ife connecté : un empire ouest-africain dans le Moyen-Âge mondialisé/ Ife connected : A West African empire in the Global Middle-Ages. Les carnets de la Fondation des Treilles. Consulté le 26 avril 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/13h6b