An Ancient Terracotta Figure from Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone is well known to students of African art history for the Sapi-Portuguese ivories—ivory sculptures made for Portuguese clients by Sierra Leonean artists in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries—and for equally ancient stone sculptures,¹ the work of earlier inhabitants of that country, unearthed by farmers and alluvial diamond miners in the course of their everyday agricultural work or gravel searching. These objects, then, are neither contemporary family or religious heirlooms, nor are they found associated with archaeological sites.² Indeed it was the resemblance between one group of these ancient stone figures, to which the Mende name nomoli is generally given, and carved figures on the Sapi-Portuguese ivories that first suggested to William Fagg (1961) that the latter might have originated in Sierra Leone. While the nomoli stone sculptures are now relatively familiar and have been the subject of a number of publications in recent years...