Ancient site · Settlement
Taruga
A Nok culture site about 60 km southeast of Abuja in central Nigeria. Excavations in the 1960s found terracotta figures together with iron-smelting furnaces and slag dated to about the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE, among the earliest evidence of iron working south of the Sahara.
Whether West Africans learned iron smelting from North Africa or invented it themselves, building on copper smelting, is still debated.
- Dates
- c. 600–200 BCE (iron smelting c. 4th–3rd century BCE)
- Still standing
- No, or only traces
- Location
- 8.88° N, 7.45° E
How we know
No writing existed; the furnaces and terracottas are dated by radiocarbon from Bernard Fagg's 1960s excavations.
Nearby sites
- Nok c. 1500 BCE – 1 CE; terracottas from c. 900 BCE
- Shum Laka used from c. 30,000 years ago to c. 400 years ago; burials c. 6000 and 1000 BCE
- Gobero c. 7700–6200 and 5200–2500 BCE
- Ounjougou oldest pottery c. 9400 BCE
- Djenné-Djenno c. 250 BCE – 1400 CE
- Tassili n'Ajjer rock art c. 10,000 BCE (debated) to the early centuries CE
Related
- Nok culture archaeological culture
- The world in 700 BCE: The Assyrian Colossus chapter