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Résumé de thèse soutenue en 2024

Earthwork Landscapes of Protection and Regulation : Chronology, Construction, and Meaning at Sungbo’s Eredo (Southwest Nigeria), Africa’s Largest Known Structure

Tomos Llywelyn Evans
p. 99-102

Entrées d’index

Index géographique :

Nigéria/Nigeria
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Notes de la rédaction

PhD en anthropologie soutenu le 12 novembre 2024 à William & Mary, Williamsburg (USA)

Direction : Neil Norman ; co-direction : Gérard Chouin ; jury : Neil Norman, Gérard Chouin, Grey Gundaker, Akinwumi Ogundiran

William & Mary 2024 Distinguished Dissertation Award

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Figure 1 – The Eredo ditch in the vicinity of the nearby village of Eredo, Lagos State, Southwest Nigeria

Figure 1 – The Eredo ditch in the vicinity of the nearby village of Eredo, Lagos State, Southwest Nigeria

A site remembered as a toll gate settlement that regulated travellers entering the Ijebu Kingdom heartland according to local oral tradition

© Tomos Llywelyn Evans

1Sungbo’s Eredo is a massive linear bank and ditch structure in southwestern Nigeria, enclosing an area of territory identified with the Ijebu Yoruba Kingdom, which at 100 miles in its total circumference is thought to be Africa’s largest known single structure (Darling 1997, 1998 ; Lloyd 1959). The Eredo is typically attributed in oral tradition to the enigmatic character of Sungbo –a powerful, wealthy woman, said to have compelled a large workforce to construct the Eredo as a monument to herself due to her inability to conceive children (Sonubi 2009), but remains little understood. This research thus explored questions pertaining to when, how, and why the Eredo was constructed, maintained, and utilized from c. 1400 to 1900 AD. It sought to address the chronology and historical context of the Eredo’s construction, the process of construction, and its evolving functions and meanings for the successive local communities that interacted with it over centuries.

2Sungbo’s Eredo is perhaps the largest single example of a more widespread structural phenomenon. Linear earthworks consisting of bank/wall and ditch enclosures were common structures across West Africa (Connah 1967, 1975 ; Chouin 2013 ; Norman & Kelly 2004 ; Soper & Darling 1980 ; Magnavita et al. 2006, 2009 ; Ajayi & Smith 1964 ; Biobaku 1957). Scholarship has tended to consider them important defensive structures, linked also to the regulation of people and things (Connah 2000a, 2000b), although it is evident that their significance also extended to their role in consolidation and reification of royal power (Chouin & Lasisi 2019 ; Norman & Kelly 2004), boundary-marking, and containing, excluding, and controlling spiritual forces (Warnier 2007).

3The research therefore centred theoretical perspectives focusing on liminality (Douglas 2010 ; Trumbull 1896 ; Turner 1995 ; Van Gennep & Kertzer 2019), monumentality (Hildebrand 2013), social complexity (Fleisher & Wynne-Jones 2010 ; McIntosh 1999 ; Pauketat 2007), landscape (Moore 2005), and local ontologies (Abiodun 2014). It approached these structures not merely as military fortifications, but also as boundaries, barriers, and thresholds, separating and regulating different worlds while also channelling and strengthening elite power. Power was also negotiated through the construction process itself, that instrumentalised the vast wealth-in-people and wealth-in-knowledge of elites in drawing together and synergizing the abilities of large numbers of labourers and specialists to construct novel, unique structural forms (Guyer & Belinga 1995 ; Law 1991).

4The 15th century AD onwards witnessed an elaboration and expansion of these structures in West Africa during an apparent period of socio-political and social turbulence, and the Eredo may have been constructed within this context as new elites emerged and sought to demarcate, protect, and regulate their new zones of authority and the people, powers, and things within and without. Sungbo’s Eredo, and the Ijebu kingdom and capital, appear to be first mentioned in a Portuguese account deriving from late 15th century observations (Fage 1980 ; Law 1986). Thus, the earthwork, kingship, and urbanism appear to have been interconnected by this date. Surveys of the earthwork (Darling 1997) confirmed it to be a single large structure, and the first radiocarbon dates suggested early 2nd millennium AD construction (Aremu et al. 2013 ; Chouin et al. 2016).

5In addressing the above questions, the work combined archaeological excavations at settlement sites near the Eredo, surveys of local shrines, and archival work. I undertook excavations on the campus of Augustine University, which the Eredo crosses, and at the nearby village of Eredo, remembered in oral tradition as a 19th century toll gate site, both in Lagos State, Nigeria. Material from Augustine was relatively scarce, but revealed a relatively discretely clustered occupation, yielding ceramics, burnt architectural material, and other items from midden deposits. At Eredo Village, large mound features were excavated, and I found that 19th and 20th century refuse layers had been accumulated on top of much older architectural mounds, dated to the late 1st millennium BC. An abundance of ceramics, whitewares, gin bottle glass, faunal remains, iron slag, and other objects were obtained, and it was found that the village is the site of a number of historic shrines to important liminal orisa (deities) directly linked to the earthwork, –both conceptually and physically (by old footpaths)– notably Sungbo, Obaluaiye (smallpox), Ogun (iron, war, agriculture), Esu (thresholds, liminality), and Gborowo (mother of the first Awujale (king)).

6I also visited 20 archives across the US, UK, and South Africa, about 13 of which had material relevant to the Ijebu Kingdom and West African earthworks. Notable among these were the private archives of Dr. Patrick Darling –containing a wealth of unpublished local maps detailing the configuration of the earthwork– and British Colonial Office and Foreign Office material from the National Archives, London, that offered detailed insights into 19th and 20th century Ijebu society, religious practice, and oral tradition. LiDAR data obtained by Woolpert, on behalf of the Ife-Sungbo Project, was also studied. This covered 1,000 square kilometres, including the entirety of the main body of the earthwork. Darling’s local maps and cross-profiles of the Eredo were georeferenced, and compared with British colonial maps, the LiDAR data, and novel survey data from this research to help better understand the Eredo landscape.

7This combined material reveals a largely single, linear earthwork structure that connects in places with “natural” topographical features such as rivers, interfluves, and elevated areas of ground, as well as other anthropogenic features such as roadways, settlements, shrines and sacred groves, many of which developed and changed over time. This formed a carefully enclosed, protected, and regulated landscape where travellers had to move through fortified official entranceways, toll areas (Falola 1989), and shrines to reach the heartlands of the Ijebu polity.

8An excavation of part of the Eredo profile at the village of Eredo (bisected by a road) yielded radiocarbon dates from the 15th and 16th century (cal AD), obtained from charcoal samples taken from the burnt basal layer of the structure. These dates were close to those of Chouin et al. (2016) from nearby profiles of the Eredo. Comparison of this and other profiles from elsewhere along the earthwork (Aremu et al. 2013 ; Chouin et al. 2022 ; Ogiogwa 2015) revealed that the architecture of the Eredo is diverse across its body, even in areas of similar geology, implying differential practices of construction at different points.

9Comparing these data with a range of historical analogies lifted from written documentary evidence and oral tradition across West Africa, I hypothesised that the Eredo was the result of a centrally-driven but locally enacted process of construction. This may have been a communal, segmented system of labour that involved corvée (obligatory) labour across the region, with different settlements responsible for different portions of the structure, perhaps mobilized by local leaders on behalf of central elites. In more recent times in West Africa, participants in the building of earthworks and walls typically also included centralised master builders (from guilds), diviners, woodworkers, blacksmiths, musicians, and other specialists whose knowledge was brought together and synergised to ensure success in, and longevity of, construction (Achi 1985 ; Ogundele & Babalola 2007).

10Ceramic evidence from the village of Eredo largely came from the 19th and 20th centuries, revealing a range of local ceramics dominated by a high diversity of carved chevron roulette designs. Relatively low-fired sherds of a reddish-brown fabric bearing a range of these designs (local ware) contrasted with rarer finer-grained, relatively high-fired ceramics of grey and black fabric decorated with combed and punctate designs more reminiscent of Northern Yoruba styles (see Ogundiran 2001). The range of local and regional material culture at the village of Eredo contrasted with the relative lack of such material at Augustine University, suggesting the former to be a hub of markets, trade, and workshops associated with an important road, entranceway, and tollgate through the Eredo. Many of the ceramics at Eredo came from monumental discard mound features, and the evidence suggests that the 19th century road passing through Sungbo’s Eredo and into the Ijebu heartland was closely associated with these mounds and nearby sacred features, they being part of a liminal landscape meant to shape, define, and regulate movement in and out of the polity.

11Tiny, intentionally placed, terracotta vessels and burnt clay fragments were also excavated from deposits beneath one of these mounds, with three associated charcoal samples yielding radiocarbon dates spanning the 6th to 2nd centuries BC, suggesting later intentional deposition of discard on ancient features.

12Based on all of this, it is argued that there were five, core, interrelated purposes surrounding Sungbo’s Eredo : military defence (especially in fortifying key roads and providing anti-cavalry measures), regulation (taxing travellers and protecting subjects within from dark forces), containment (defining and housing the main people, organizations, and powers of the kingdom), secrecy (controlling movement and guarding knowledge to protect the kingdom), and mnemonics (recalling important deities and ancestral personages associated with the structure and its shrines).

13Of course, memory and concepts surrounding the Eredo have evolved over time, and in the 20th century, Sungbo came to be associated with the Quranic/Biblical Queen of Sheba (Darling 1997, 1998). It is argued that this was a process of “syncretism” –a phenomenon with deep historical roots in this region– by which the complex character of Sungbo came to be identified with the Queen of Sheba due to their similar traits as people converted to Islam and Christianity, as colonial ideologies spread, and as some Nigerian Christians began embracing Ethiopianism.

14In closing, Sungbo’s Eredo may, originally, have been constructed as a powerful, elaborate technology of protection, regulation, and rulership by an emergent elite (the basis of the Awujale dynasty) with forms of sacred kingship intimately connected with the ability to effectively delineate, entrench, define and control a specific place, population, and the esoteric forces within it. More broadly, this study has sought to show that linear earthworks were important architectural compositions with both physical and spiritual dimensions. They were multifunctional, evolving, amalgamative landscapes, with new settlements, pathways, entranceways, and shrines continually being added to them over time, and complex structures that drew upon diverse geotechnical and architectural knowledge in their building.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Figure 1 – The Eredo ditch in the vicinity of the nearby village of Eredo, Lagos State, Southwest Nigeria
Légende A site remembered as a toll gate settlement that regulated travellers entering the Ijebu Kingdom heartland according to local oral tradition
Crédits © Tomos Llywelyn Evans
URL http://journals.openedition.org/aaa/docannexe/image/5904/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1,3M
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Tomos Llywelyn Evans, « Earthwork Landscapes of Protection and Regulation : Chronology, Construction, and Meaning at Sungbo’s Eredo (Southwest Nigeria), Africa’s Largest Known Structure »Afrique : Archéologie & Arts, 21 | 2025, 99-102.

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Tomos Llywelyn Evans, « Earthwork Landscapes of Protection and Regulation : Chronology, Construction, and Meaning at Sungbo’s Eredo (Southwest Nigeria), Africa’s Largest Known Structure »Afrique : Archéologie & Arts [En ligne], 21 | 2025, mis en ligne le 20 octobre 2025, consulté le 13 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/aaa/5904 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/14zmc

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Tomos Llywelyn Evans

tomos@wustl.edu – Department of African-American Studies, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri (USA)

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