The Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) in Benin City, Nigeria, will open its MOWAA Institute next week, the first completed building of a planned 15-acre campus that will also include the Rainforest gallery and other facilities by 2028. In advance of the opening, Antiquity magazine published an updated report on the MOWAA Archeological Project (2022–2024), a collaboration among MOWAA, the British Museum, and Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments, with Cambridge Archaeological Unit and Wessex Archaeology as delivery partners. The excavations, the first at the royal palace complex since the 1960s, used both digs and ground-penetrating radar, with radiocarbon dating revealing artifacts spanning from before the Benin Kingdom through its collapse and colonial and postcolonial eras.
This matters because the project marks a significant step in reclaiming and studying Benin’s precolonial heritage, especially after the British military raid of 1897 that looted thousands of bronzes from the royal palace. The MOWAA Institute will serve as a center for research, conservation, and display of archaeological finds, as well as a home for repatriated objects like Benin bronzes, directly addressing the legacy of colonial plunder and advancing Nigeria’s cultural sovereignty.