[Music] we're in the Brooklyn Museum looking at a life-siz male head this is one of the oldest terracottas from subsaharan Africa in fact it's about 2,500 years old it's from a part of Africa that we now call Nigeria and this is one of numerous life-siz human figures that have been found we found heads we've found bodies positioned in standing or seated or prayer positions and we've also found animals from this region they're called knock terracottas and no really just refers to a small village where the very first one was found but since then we found quite a few in present day Nigeria these have been found by farmers people tilling fields and as a result many of the objects come without a careful scientific archaeological method that would give us more information about the objects themselves and in fact we don't even have a name of a culture that made them they're so old but what we do know is that originally they were fired with a slip and they were smooth in texture they're terracotta and they're hollow and they would have originally had color applied to them and what slip really is are very small fragments of clay often with iron oxide that's mixed in that can become a black or a red depending on how it's fired they were either built up through a coiling technique or maybe it was a block of clay that was then hollowed out which suggests a subtractive technique well there's no question that there's some subtractive work here because we can see it in sizing into the surface and we can see it scraping away creating these beautiful highly refined geometric forms for the face and most of the objects that we've found are very stylized and similar in that they all have this triangular shaped eye with a perforated pupil these arched brows one of the most distinctive features of this head is the hair wonderful mounds these craters around the back of the head if you look closely in the back you can actually see lines suggest the parting of the hair and striation which even suggests the combing process it's important to remember when we're looking at an object like this that we're not seeing it in its original context the way it was used the kind of environment it would have been in and of course its original colors and whether or not there would have been anything added when I see for example the perforations of the eyes which go all the way into the hollow of the clay object itself my instinct is to imagine that that was filled with something but we don't know and then if we also look at the mouth the mouth is slightly open it suggests maybe speech that the figure has something to tell us it's so animated this is a figure that seems to be in the midst of a conversation this is an object that was made at the same time that ancient Greece and Rome were in power that ancient Egypt was still functioning and yet here we are in subsaharan Africa clearly evidence of a very sophisticated culture it suggests that there was a artmaking tradition in West Africa that is as ancient as Egypt and that these artists were concerned with representation of the human form we don't have an example of the body that this went with but we know that the bodies generally were smaller in scale than the head so it suggests that the head was the most significant part and we find that tradition of the head as the center the seed of wisdom in other cultures throughout West Africa in the same region today there's a subtlety to the abstraction of the face that I find really compelling look for example at the way that the eyes which are straight across at the top and then dipped down creates a sense of quietness in the figure and a sense of seriousness a sense of gravity in the figure but then is perfectly echoed in the area above the eye between the top lid and the eyebrow it suggests an inner calm or an inner serenity that may tell us something more about the figure than just their surface depiction it may suggest something about an inner thought or an inner morality that the artist was trying to convey [Music]