Traditional Water Pot Installations and Functions in Parts of Igboland, Southeast Nigeria

Traditional pottery production in Igboland was women's business just as it was in many other parts of Nigeria. It has been observed that Igbo women exhibited some high level of creativity both in the form and decoration of their traditional pottery. They also developed distinctive styles of pottery production, producing different kinds of earthenware, which included varieties of water pots used for cooking food and storing water around southeast Nigeria. While the methods of installing the water pots for use within family compounds varied from one part of Igboland to the other, the composition of pots installed in every compound appears as an installation art. Even the forms of the traditional water pots sometimes varied significantly, depending on the pottery styles of different communities that produced them and the purpose the earthenware was made to serve. Our paper focuses on the different patterns of water pot installations in parts of Igboland. It also discusses the forms and usages of traditional water pots among households in the Southeast Nigeria.

Introduction

It is known that the earliest terracotta findings so far discovered in Africa belong to the Nok culture of Nigeria. The Ife of the Yoruba tribe has also been historically significant for the archaeological findings of life-size naturalistic terracotta and bronze heads made in Nigeria, which date as early as 11th century AD. The Ife pieces exhibit “an intellectual grasp of mensuration which is classical in Greek sense”. Little wonder that Nok and Ife