The Yoruba: A New History is the first transdisciplinary study of the two-thousand-year journey of the Yoruba people, from their origins in a small corner of the Niger-Benue Confluence in present-day Nigeria to becoming one of the most populous cultural groups on the African continent.

Weaving together archaeology with linguistics, environmental science with oral traditions, and material culture with mythology, Ogundiran examines the local, regional, and even global dimensions of Yoruba history. The Yoruba: A New History offers an intriguing cultural, political, economic, intellectual, and social history from ca. 300 BC to 1840. It accounts for the events, peoples, and practices, as well as the theories of knowledge, ways of being, and social valuations that shaped the Yoruba experience at different junctures of time. The result is a new framework for understanding the Yoruba past and present.

About the Author

Akinwumi Ogundiran is Chancellor's Professor and Professor of Africana Studies, Anthropology & History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is a co-editor of Materialities of Rituals in the Black Atlantic, named a Choice magazine's 2015 outstanding book.

Reviews

The Yoruba: A New History by Akinwumi Ogundiran is an excellent compendium of Yoruba studies focused on the period from 300 BC to AD 1840. The result is a "new history" of the Yoruba born from systematic methods of research, inference, and interpretation that fit together knowledge from oral history, archaeology, and linguistic anthropology. The author's creative blend of methods, theories, models, and approaches establishes the concept of the book as a new cultural history of the Yoruba.

-- O. Lasisi * African Archaeological Review *

The Yoruba: A New History is daring in scope and ambition and takes to task canonical stories of Yoruba history. It is engaging and crosses datasets, making the case for a study of the deeper past that goes beyond the information oered by recent historical texts and the often-sober archaeological data. In this, Akin Ogundiran has written a book to be warmly welcomed by archaeologists.

-- Anne Haour * AZANIA: ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH IN AFRICA *


Awards
Winner of Vinson Sutlive Prize for Historical Anthropology 2021 (United States).



Book Information
ISBN 9780253051493
Author Akinwumi Ogundiran
Format Paperback
Page Count 562
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press
Weight(grams) 939g