This study restates the crucial relevance of the Igbo-Ukwu archaeology in West African history. It tackles the persistent questions surrounding the ninth-century date amidst the concerns scholars have raised about carbon dating. The result corroborates the original timeline identified with the artifacts.

Considering the monumental archaeological work Igbo-Ukwu symboliz- es, and the heated concerns scholars have raised about the carbon dating, the time is long overdue to take advantage of advances in scientific research to propose a resolution to the lingering questions surrounding the ninth-century date. Since 1970, experts have produced techniques for ame- liorating radiocarbon errors, including dendrochronology, and the Urani- um-Thorium method (used to recalibrate not to measure), hailed by Batler as “radiocarbon dating’s final frontier.”¹ Averaged means of the five sig- nificant Igbo-Ukwu findings computed from the initial radiocarbon figures, the dendrochronology corrections, and U-Th recalibrations show that Samples 1-2008 (902 CE) and Hv-1514 (923 CE) could not have been anywhere later than the first half of the tenth-century. Samples Hv-1515 (894 CE) and 1-1784 fall within the ninth century, and Sample Hv-1516 (1469 CE) belonged to the mid-fifteenth-century.

In 1939, Igbo-Ukwu, a small town in eastern Nigeria, took a protuberant place in the domain of African archaeology when a laborer digging a water reservoir (ọmị) in the compound of the Anozies (Isaiah, Richard, and Jonah) found a cache of bronze artifacts.² Similar findings in 1949 a few feet away led Bernard Fagg, then director of Nigerian Federal Department of Antiquities (NFDA), to invite Thurstan Shaw, a British archaeologist, to conduct an expert study of the area. Shaw tagged the three sites that were the focus of his research after their owners: Igbo-Isaiah, Igbo-Richard, and Igbo-Jonah. The recovery of I65,000 pieces of glass and stone beads, 1,300 iron, copper, and bronze objects, over 20,000 broken fragments of pottery, and some whole ornate vessels from the excavation revealed an ancient Igbo civilization with advanced bronze metalworking.³

The results of the excavation that appeared first as an “Interim Re- port” in Man (1960) drew widespread enthusiasm among scholars. In his review of Shaw’s work, for instance, an appreciative Guy Atkins described it as “nothing comparable” ever “known from Nigeria or elsewhere in West Africa.”⁴ The eminent historian A. E. Afigbo captured the popular sentiment fully when he greeted Shaw’s effort as a “renaissance” (that is a development that was to bring about the validation of accounts already produced from oral sources and conjectures) in Igbo historical studies. Afigbo noted that the Igbo, as evident with other precolonial ethnic groups lacking a widely developed writing culture, are “anxious to discover their origin and reconstruct how they came to be who they are,” and to appreciate “the reality of their group identity which they want to anchor into authenticated history.”⁵ Four decades later, archaeologist Ben- edicta Mangut added that the Igbo-Ukwu artifacts stand as “a good example of indigenous processes of trade expansion, social stratification, and urbanization in Igboland in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries.”⁶ 

In perspective, the period between the 1950s and 1970s was both excit- ing and depressing as scientists went back and forth with conflicting re- ports on the usefulness and complications of radiocarbon dating.⁷ In questioning the authenticity of the Igbo-Ukwu periodization, critics cast doubt over the history behind the ancient settlement. This turn of events punctured the celebration of Igbo-Ukwu as the most influential post-World War II era archaeological discovery in West Africa. By implication, the Igbo search for its historical past scholars had predicated on the archaeological discoveries turned into a mirage. It is vital to seek a resolution to the periodization deadlock because there are critical historical questions connected with the ancient settlement that deserve precise answers. For instance, were the Igbo-Ukwu people an ancient civilization as ethnographers and colonial officers such as M.D.W. Jeffreys concluded several decades before the Igbo-Ukwu findings?⁸ Did the ancient Igbo directly or indirectly participate in the trans-Saharan trade as contended by some scholars and disputed by others?⁹ Did the Igbo-Ukwu artifacts predate the famous Benin and Ife terracotta objects?¹⁰ Getting the Igbo-Ukwu timeline right holds the answers to these questions. The key is to use the post-Igbo- Ukwu radiocarbon research to revisit the chronology. First, a quick review of the radiocarbon technique and its mathematical principles is impera- tive. Following this is a brief highlight of the major questions that scholars have raised about the ninth-century chronology. The last section presents a revised Igbo-Ukwu periodization computed from averaged means of radiocarbon, dendrochronology, and the Uranium-Thorium dating method.