Bolaji Owoseni

My name is Bolaji Owoseni and I am currently the Senior Research Associate under the British Academy Global Professorship project titled "West African Communities through Museum Collections," led by Professor Abubakar Sule of the Sainsbury Research Unit, UEA. I am a Nigerian archaeologist, ethnohistorian, and heritage and museum practitioner and academic interested in the archaeology and material culture of wider West Africa, the Atlantic Ocean world and its global interconnections. I have a PhD in Art History and World Art History (with a focus on Archaeology) from the University of East Anglia, UK (2023). Prior to this, I earned BSc and MSc degrees in Anthropological Archaeology at the University of Ibadan. Between 2015 and 2018, I was a lecturer of Archaeology and Economic History at Kwara State University and a field archaeologist in major national and international projects in Nigeria and the UK.

In 2023-2024, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research and College Postdoctoral Associate at Jesus College, University of Cambridge. As a result of my fellowship, I am currently a visitor and a recipient of a development fellowship fund at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge.

My PhD research, "Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Investigation of the Ilorin Settlement, Kwara State, Nigeria," examined the sociopolitical dynamics of medieval Yorubaland borderlands and their regional connections to major West African political centres, such as Oyo and Ile-Ife, through material culture. This work involved surveys and excavations in Ilorin, a review of extensive archaeological and anthropological literature of West African major centres, their borderlands, and social identity theories. This work challenged dominant frontier theories, which viewed borderlands emerging only after the establishment of central polities, offering new insights into borderlands' sociopolitical dynamics. By dating the Ilorin settlement to the first millennium AD, my research demonstrates that many medieval borderlands either predated or existed contemporaneously with their associated major political centres and were integral to regional development from the earliest periods of complex social organisation. I am currently preparing my PhD thesis for major publication, tentatively titled "Excavations in Ilorin, Northern Yorubaland, Nigeria: New Insights on Frontier Community and Regional Socio-Political Development."

Currently as a Senior Research Associate, I am examining museum collections on the social and political history of the Kanem-Borno Empire and the Hausa states, people, and culture.

I am also the principal investigator of a Wenner-Gren anthropological archaeological project on the medieval archaeology of the Northern Yorubaland frontier Nigeria.