Overview

This book provides a full up to date account of the evidence relating to the Middle Stone Age in Nigeria and the other countries of West Africa. It relies upon the author’s own fieldwork and extensive personal knowledge of the region and its archaeology. It is abundantly illustrated with maps, photographs, and drawings. The emphasis is on stratigraphy, chronology, site situation, and artefact characteristics, with such general background information about the countries concerned as is required. A summary account is also provided of the current situation in relation to this topic (covering climate, archaeology, and human evolution) in the African continent as a whole, so that a judgement can made as to how the West African evidence fits in with the rest. In general accounts of the African palaeolithic record up to now, West Africa tends to be neglected, so this book goes a long way to fill a gap in the available literature.

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9781789691382

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Reviews

‘'This is a very well-researched text on the Middle Stone Age (MSA) of Nigeria in particular and West Africa in general... It is a text that every archaeologist, irrespective of their area of specialization, should have on the bookshelf as a reference material.’ – Raphael A. Alabi (2020): African Archaeological Review ‘Although it declares to speak only of the Middle Stone Age of Nigeria in the West African context, this work will become the reference work on the Middle Stone Age of a West Africa stretching from Senegal to Cameroon.’ – Alain Marliac (2022): Journal des Africanistes 2021, 91-2

'This is a very well-researched text on the Middle Stone Age (MSA) of Nigeria in particular and West Africa in general... It is a text that every archaeologist, irrespective of their area of specialization, should have on the bookshelf as a reference material.' -- Raphael A. Alabi * African Archaeological Review *

Author Information

PHILIP ALLSWORTH-JONES completed his PhD on the European Palaeolithic in Cambridge, before serving as a staff member of the Department of Archaeology in Ibadan for a number of years, during which time much of the fieldwork described in this work was carried out. He subsequently held an analogous appointment at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, but he has continued to take an interest in West Africa up to this day. He is currently an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Archaeology of the University of Sheffield, and while holding this appointment he has in recent years published a number of works on Nigeria, including the results of his excavations at the rock shelter sites of Itaakpa and Kariya Wuro. This is however his first attempt to tell the story of the Middle Stone Age in West Africa as a whole in book form.

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