Shifting approaches, innovative methods: collection histories as a tool to move beyond William Fagg’s ‘Lower Niger Bronze Industry Mystery’

At the end of 2019, the British Museum launched a new research project focusing on copper alloy objects associated with the Lower Niger Bronze Industry. The aim was to increase knowledge of these objects through a combination of provenance and collection history research and scientific analysis. This paper will outline the earlier art historical- focused approach to the Lower Niger Bronzes corpus and will then describe the new research and its methodology. Initial findings will be presented through a case study of objects from the Forcados River in the Niger Delta region of present- day Nigeria. In doing so, we aim to explore some of the outcomes and challenges experienced in implementing the aforementioned shift in approach and methodology.