I am acutely aware of the shortcomings concerning unpublished site reports. We still await detailed reports on the associations and retrieval circumstances of the corpus of Nok culture finds apart from those from the site of Taruga. As the major excavations of that site have only taken place over the last three years, it is too soon to expect more than an interim report (Fagg 1968a, b). The Department of Archaeology of the University of Ghana recently announced a monograph series to be published two or three times a year, that will contain the reports of recent excavations by members of the Department's staff. One of the most important of the nine titles already on the list, in relation to the subject under discussion, concerns the site of Ntereso. This report, somewhat significantly, is titled "Excavations at the Neolithic site of Ntereso," although elsewhere this has been indexed as an "Iron Age site" (Davies 1964:267). Reports on excavations carried out at Ife (Willett 1959a, b, 1960, 1967) are in preparation. The full report on the Igbo-Ukwu excavations (Shaw 1960, 1965) was completed in the middle of 1967 and is in the hands of a publisher-waiting for a subsidy. Much of the report on the Benin excavations (Connah 1963, 1967a, 1968) has already been completed, and the excavator of Daima has been doing little else for the last 18 months besides working on the material and preparing it for publication (Connah 1967b, 1967c, 1968). Work on preparing detailed reports on excavations in eastern Nigeria (Hartle 1966) was in progress when the secession of Biafra interrupted it. Finally, efforts are being made to found a West African journal of Archaeology to publish full excavation reports, as an outgrowth of the W4Vest .4frican Arclhaeological Newsletter, which has proved so useful for the exchange of interim information (Connah and Shaw 1968). I concur with the first part of Stuiver and van der Merwe's statement, that there is a need to document fully the appearance of iron technology in West Africa. We have long been aware of this need, and five years ago I placed my faith in radiocarbon dating as a principal instrument for this (Shaw 1963a:27). I spelled this out again in a survey of Nigerian archaeology and in a consideration of what research policy should be (Shaw 1963b:463-64). I am happy to report that the information from the date lists is no longer as meagre as when Stuiver and van der Merwe were writing, and that the number of dates available from Nigeria has more than doubled in the last 12 months. I have just sent to press a list of 71 dates. Twenty-three of these concern the Stone Age only, but the remainder are reproduced in Table 1. How are these dates to be interpreted in conjunction with other dates available for Ghana, and in relation to the introduction of iron into West Africa ? Of the original Nok dates, one (Y142-3) was omitted from Stuiver and van der Merwe's list. In the original publication of the dates Y-142-3 was rejected as being impossibly old and the result of redeposition (Barendsen et al. 1957). It was then stated that The three younger samples confirm the belief that the Nok figurine culture began within the Nakuran moist phase and bracket its date between about 2000 B.C. and A.D. 200, with the most probable date being that of Y-142-4 about 900 B.C.
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