Bara’s charcoal charts a two-thousand-year shift from palm fuel to hardwoods
Source: “Anthracological analysis of charcoal from Bara, Southwestern Nigeria: implications for paleoenvironment and firewood history” — Frontiers ↗, 28 August 2026
Archaeonews Summary
At Bara, near Oyo-Ile in southwestern Nigeria, the study reports analysis of 2,972 archaeological charcoal fragments recovered during excavations between 2018 and 2022. The samples came mainly from residential deposits and one refuse context spanning the Yangi Early Iron Age, the Atokuta phase and the Oyo Imperial period, roughly 400 BC to AD 1835. The paper assigns those contexts to established cultural phases but does not state a radiocarbon or other absolute dating method for the quoted ranges.
Alemseged Beldados, Akinwumi Ogundiran and Macham Mangut identified the charcoal by examining wood anatomy on transverse, tangential and radial surfaces, using light microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, reference collections, InsideWood and IAWA criteria. The assemblage records a shift from a small early sample containing oil-palm remains and a few woody taxa toward broader use of hardwoods such as Terminalia, Pericopsis, Senegalia and Entandrophragma in later periods.
Why It Matters
This matters because Bara provides a rare long sequence for a region where archaeological wood-charcoal datasets remain thin. Comparable anthracological work at Janruwa in central Nigeria and the Bassar iron-production zone in Togo has shown that charcoal can track both vegetation and human fuel choices. Bara extends that approach into a settlement sequence that reaches the Oyo imperial metropolis, allowing household procurement, pottery firing and landscape pressure to be considered together.
The paper is peer-reviewed original research, and its taxonomic procedure is clearly described. Its strongest conclusion is therefore not a simple story of climate-driven vegetation change, but that fuel use became more diverse and more hardwood-focused over time. The main caution is sampling: the earliest Yangi phase contains only 18 fragments, against hundreds or thousands later, so the apparent early narrowness is fragile. Charcoal also records selected and burned wood, not vegetation directly. The authors themselves allow both environmental change and cultural preference; the evidence does not yet separate their relative weight.