Fagg, Bernard Evelyn Buller

Government archaeologist in Nigeria. Curator at Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford 1964-1975. Brother of African art scholar William Buller Fagg.

"After graduation he began to work for the British colonial administration in Jos, Nigeria, in 1939. He excavated the Rop rock shelter on the Jos Plateau in 1944, a site that contained both early stone-age implements and later artifacts, including pottery about 2000 years old. Fagg first encountered archaeological finds of what became later known as the Nok culture, after the village of Nok where the first terracotta figurines where found. He undertook a controlled evacuation of the site at Taruga, finding both terracotta figurines and iron slag with radiocarbon dates from about the fourth and third centuries BC.

In 1947 Fagg was appointed as the assistant surveyor of antiquities of the newly founded Department of Antiquities of the colonial administration. In 1952 he founded the National Museum in Jos, the first public museum in Nigeria. He became head in 1957 after the first director Kenneth Murray retired. After Nigeria became independent, Fagg became the curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford in 1963." Wikipedia, 2016-04-20.