The Stone Sculptures of the Upper Guinea Coast

Abstract

The Upper Guinea Coast—the modern Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia—is one of the few parts of Africa where people have carved stone sculptures. The stone figures sculpted there, usually in soft steatite, or soap-stone, are generally called nomoli or pomta, depending on whether they have the standard features of figures found in southeastern Sierra Leone, or of those from the Kono and Kissi areas further north. There is a third group which consists mainly of sculpted heads on pedestal-like necks. They have been known to Europeans since at least the 1850s, and scholars have been publishing articles about them since 1901. This paper is a critical review of these publications.