The National Museum of Jos as an Archaeological Archive

This article set out to address a methodological challenge that has become increasingly urgent for African archaeology: how can the archives of archaeology, including collections of artefacts, field documentation, registers, and ‘grey literature’, be mobilised not merely for purposes of heritage inventory and disciplinary historiography, but as first-hand sources of archaeological data capable of producing renewed historical knowledge of past African societies? The case of the National Museum of Jos demonstrates both the necessity and the difficulty of such a project. We argue that the Jos archive must therefore be treated as a layered corpus, shaped by successive regimes of data production and governance. The resulting archival ecology has been hybrid and fragmented. Yet fragmentation, as shown here, does not prevent archival archaeology; it defines the conditions under which archaeological knowledge can be responsibly reconstructed from ‘legacy data’

Discipline · Field (mathematics · Field research · Knowledge production · National museum · World heritage · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Archaeology and Rock Art Studies · Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Agriculture