# Igbo-Ukwu: Ninth Century or Fifteenth? Fifty Years of Disputed Dates

In 1959 a man digging a cistern in his compound at Igbo-Ukwu, in what is now Anambra State, southeastern Nigeria, struck bronze. What came out of the ground over the next few years, excavated properly by Thurstan Shaw between 1959 and 1964, was extraordinary by any standard: leaded bronze regalia cast with a technical sophistication that has no clear predecessor anywhere in West Africa, more than 150,000 glass and stone beads, textile fragments, ivory, and the burial of a man seated on a stool with the trappings of high office. Nothing like it had been found in the forest zone before.

How old it is has been argued for over fifty years, and the argument is not over.

Shaw’s five samples

Shaw sent charcoal and one piece of wood for radiocarbon dating and got five results, published in his two-volume excavation report in 1970. Four of the five clustered around the mid-ninth century CE. The fifth, from a different context, came out in the fifteenth century. Shaw treated the four as the reliable group and the site’s age as ninth century, revising his own reading in the 1970 report to a calibrated range of the eighth to eleventh century at one standard deviation. That reading has outlasted every version of it since. Textbooks, museum labels and encyclopaedia entries still give Igbo-Ukwu as ninth century, because that is the number that got printed first and stuck.

Lawal’s objection

In 1973 the Nigerian art historian Babatunde Lawal published a short, pointed paper in the Journal of African History. His summary of the evidence, in his own words, was this: four of the five radiocarbon dates fell in the middle of the ninth century, the fifth fell in the middle of the fifteenth, and other evidence, the presence of European-type manillas and beads, and the survival of highly perishable materials such as textiles, thread and wood, pointed to a much later date. I quote his framing because it is exact and because it has been reduced, in later retellings, to „Lawal disagreed.“ He did not dispute the radiocarbon results. He disputed which of the five to trust, and he had two independent reasons for preferring the outlier.

The first was the manillas. These are the open, horseshoe-shaped metal rings that became a West African trade currency; Lawal’s own later research argued their standard European form dates from Portuguese contact in the late fifteenth century onward. If manilla-type objects were present at Igbo-Ukwu, a burial centuries before Portuguese ships reached the Gulf of Guinea would need another explanation.

The second was preservation. Textile fragments, thread, and worked wood are perishable. In the acidic, wet soils and heavy rainfall of the region, Lawal argued, such material could not plausibly survive five hundred years to the excavator’s trowel. A few hundred years was more credible.

His conclusion, again in his own words: until concrete evidence could be produced to support the ninth-century date, the fifteenth-century date could not be set aside, since it was corroborated by the manillas and the beads.

Shaw’s answer

Shaw replied in the same journal in 1975, in a paper titled, pointedly, „Those Igbo-Ukwu radiocarbon dates: facts, fictions and probabilities.“ He went back through the sample locations, addressed the preservation argument directly, and set out why the outlying fifteenth-century date, from the wood identified as part of the burial stool, could be misleading on its own terms. If the wood came from the heartwood of a long-lived tree, the timber could be centuries older than the tree was felled, and far older again than the year the stool was buried. A date on old wood dates the wood, not the burial. That argument still holds regardless of who is right about the century, and later commentators, Susan McIntosh among them, have kept repeating it: only one of the five dates was a direct date on a finished artefact, and it is the one most vulnerable to exactly this problem.

Lawal was not answered on the manillas by Shaw’s reply, and the question of what, precisely, the excavated metal objects were and were not, whether „manilla-like“ pieces at Igbo-Ukwu really match the post-contact type Lawal had in mind, was never fully closed in the exchange. It has mostly been set aside rather than resolved, on the working assumption that the four radiocarbon dates outweigh a typological argument about currency forms that were still being defined.

What the numbers actually say, recalibrated

Shaw’s five dates were run in the 1960s, when radiocarbon measurement had wide error margins and calibration against tree-ring records was in its infancy. McIntosh and Caroline Cartwright, revisiting the same five results with modern calibration curves for the site’s fiftieth-anniversary symposium in 2022, found that four of the five, at two standard deviations, the range now used, span the seventh to the thirteenth century CE. Not the ninth century precisely. A four-hundred-year window. The ninth-century date that appears in every textbook is the midpoint of that window under an older, narrower calibration, not a hard result under current method. McIntosh states plainly that claiming precision to a particular century was never justified by this data, let alone a specific calendar year.

New evidence has come from work Shaw never had. McIntosh and Cartwright ran an AMS date, a more precise radiocarbon technique using an accelerator rather than the older counting method, on a textile fragment from the Igbo Isaiah deposit: eleventh to twelfth century CE. Separately, Kingsley Daraojimba and colleagues, excavating new trenches at the site in 2019 and 2021, recovered pottery of the same elaborately grooved, bifid-lipped style found in the original dig and got three fresh radiocarbon dates from stratified deposits containing it: the late ninth to the thirteenth century CE, with the youngest sample landing between the late twelfth and mid-thirteenth century.

None of the new dating points to the fifteenth century Lawal argued for. All of it points later than Shaw’s ninth-century headline, and all of it lands within, not beyond, the wide range that the recalibrated old dates already allowed. The area of agreement has moved, not from ninth to fifteenth, but from a false ninth-century point estimate to a genuine multi-century window running roughly from the ninth to the thirteenth.

What doesn’t add up

**A century was printed as fact from a four-to-one split under 1960s error margins.** Shaw’s own 1970 report gives a calibrated range, not a point date, and even that range was built on radiocarbon science that modern calibration curves have since widened to a span of six centuries for the same four samples. The headline „ninth century“ survived because it was the first number in print, not because it was the best-supported one, then or now. What would settle the Igbo Richard burial itself, as opposed to the wider site: a direct AMS date on organic material from the burial context that is not old wood, since the one artefact-direct date in Shaw’s original set is exactly the kind of sample that can run centuries older than the event it is meant to date.

**Lawal’s manilla argument was never actually tested against the excavated objects.** He proposed a specific, checkable claim, that manilla-type metal pieces at Igbo-Ukwu resembled a post-1500 Portuguese trade form, and the exchange with Shaw did not settle whether the objects match that form or an earlier, unrelated one. Fifty years on, the newer dating papers do not revisit the manillas at all; they work from ceramics and organic material instead. The typological question Lawal raised has been bypassed by better radiocarbon evidence, not answered by it. What would close it: a direct metallurgical and typological comparison of the Igbo-Ukwu ring objects against dated manilla assemblages from known Atlantic-trade contexts, the kind of lead-isotope and trace-element work now being done on the Benin Bronzes‘ brass, applied here instead.

What stays open

Whether the Igbo Richard burial itself, as against the wider settlement, falls early or late in the ninth-to-thirteenth-century window is not resolved by any dataset published so far. The site’s radiocarbon record has gone from one confident, too-narrow answer to an honest, wider one, and an honest wider answer is progress, even though it will not fit as neatly on a museum label.

KardiKassin

Writes about Africa’s history and how it gets told, sourced and checked at every step.

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Sources

• Shaw, Thurstan: Igbo-Ukwu: An Account of Archaeological Discoveries in Eastern Nigeria. 2 vols. London: Faber and Faber, 1970
• Shaw, Thurstan: Those Igbo-Ukwu Radiocarbon Dates: Facts, Fictions and Probabilities. Journal of African History 16 (4), 1975, pp. 503 to 517
• Lawal, Babatunde: Dating Problems at Igbo-Ukwu. Journal of African History 14 (1), 1973, pp. 1 to 8
• McIntosh, Susan Keech: Igbo-Ukwu at 50: A Symposium on Recent Archaeological Research and Analysis. African Archaeological Review 39 (4), 2022, pp. 369 to 385. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10437-022-09495-5; and McIntosh, Susan Keech and Caroline R. Cartwright: Igbo-Ukwu Textiles: AMS Dating and Fiber Analysis, same issue, pp. 405 to 418
• Daraojimba, Kingsley Chinedu, Abidemi Babatunde Babalola, Marcus Brittain et al.: Expanding Space and Time at Igbo-Ukwu: Insights from Recent Fieldwork. African Archaeological Review 39 (4), 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10437-022-09499-1