Ife in the History of West African Sculpture

Frank Willett's Ife in the History of West African Sculpture, published by Thames and Hudson in 1967, is a scholarly study of the naturalistic bronze and terracotta sculptural tradition of Ife, the Yoruba holy city, written by an archaeologist who conducted excavation work at Ife himself. Its strength is that it is grounded in Willett's own fieldwork and remains a foundational reference in African art history for placing Ife sculpture within a documented archaeological sequence rather than treating it, as some earlier European writers had, as inexplicable without outside influence. Its limit is its age, nearly sixty years, during which further excavation and dating work has refined the chronology Willett proposed, so a precise date or attribution drawn from this source should be checked against more recent Ife archaeology rather than treated as the final word on a still active area of research.