Settlement cycling and regional interactions in central Yoruba -land, AD 1200--1900: Archaeology and history in Ilare District, Nigeria

Archaeological and historical investigations were conducted in Ìlàrè district (Nigeria) to understand the trajectories of settlement cycles, cultural-historical relationships, and regional interactions between the 13th and the 19th century. The operational framework of the study is anchored on the perspective that the cultural-historical dynamics of Ìlàrè district were products of diachronic changes in the relationships among several settlements and communities at local and regional levels in Yorùbá-land. Using a direct-historical approach that integrates material culture, oral traditions, and ethnographic data, the study demonstrates that the settlement history of Ìlàrè district is of four major cycles. Each settlement cycle was affected not only by local factional competitions but also by changes in the directionality of regional interactions.;In view of the cyclical nature of sociopolitical units in Ìlàrè district, this investigation stresses the need for a research methodology that would reckon with the mobile nature of sociopolitically complex communities in the archaeological records. It also rejects the tribal evolutionary model of sociopolitical development, and demonstrates that Ìlàrè settlements were products of a variegated process of regional interactions between urban states and small-scale village polities in which a vast network of interpersonal contacts and decisions played the most important roles. This study enables us to understand the holistic configuration of regional interactions that link the metropoles of Ife and Old Òyó with the frontier settlements of Ìlàrè district. The investigation shows that the existence of Ìlàrè community and its institutions outlast the long-term shifts in settlement units, sociopolitical configuration, and demographic composition for about 800 years. The study concludes that the physical landscape of Ìlàrè is a sociohistorical space and that the community took its settlement name and institutions with it each period it changed its habitation site.