Investigating The Dynamics of Craft Production in the Socioeconomic and Political Complexities of Ancient Igbo Ukwu: Pathways for West African Archaeology

This dissertation investigates the organization of ceramics crafts industry in ancient Igbo Ukwu (9th - 12th Century CE) within broader West African history of the 1st to mid-2nd Millenium CE. Three sites, Igbo Isaiah, Igbo Richard, and Igbo Jonah were excavated in Igbo Ukwu between 1959 and 1964. The excavations over two seasons yielded the storied Igbo Ukwu material corpus including about 75kg of copper objects, 21,000 ceramics, 165,000 glass beads, some textiles, stones, and other organic items. While studies of the glass beads and metals in the assemblage highlight Igbo Ukwu’s connection to broader West African trade networks, the nature of the crafts industry that produced and/or consumed such highly decorated materials remain unknown. Thus, this dissertation adopts the ceramic assemblage as resources to investigate crafts organization in the ancient society. Using a suite of complementary methods including archival studies, macroscopic ceramic studies, and material science techniques, this dissertation investigates the provenance of the Igbo Ukwu ceramics, and reconstructs the processes through which the ceramics were manufactured. I examine how technological choices are embedded in the pottery products which are then distributed and deposited in varying contexts of usage in the archaeological record. I highlight three main ceramic paste recipes that were exploited in vaying manner by the potters to produce the ceramic vessels of significant macroscopic variability recovered from archaeologicla excavations in Igbo Ukwu. Further, building on archaeological models of crafts organzation combined with data from the ceramic production and consumption pattern studies, I propose a heterarchical organization of crafts production in ancinet Igbo Ukwu. In this system, crafts organization is not controlled by the political elite. Instead, the production, distribution, and consumption of ceramics in ancinet Igbo Ukwu may have been motivated by other primary factors such as religious/ritual demands in antiquity. This research highlights the mutifacead and bi-directional interaction between crafts organization and political economies by underscoring how crafts materials reflects, and are products of the interaction between economic, sociocultural, and socipolitical structures that obtained in human societies. This research also demonstrates the utility of inter-discipilary approach to archaeological cermaic materials in West Africa. It advances the integration of archaeological ceramic materials insto studies of crafts production as means to further understanding of the mosaic nature of ancient craft economies in West Africa. This research through the utilization of the mataeirality of archaeological objects is vital for demystifying the history of ancient Igbo Ukwu society by highlighing local provenance for the ceramic materials and reconstructing the ceramic production history.