Biography

Léa Roth received her PhD in History from the Università degli Studi di Pavia and the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in 2023. Beginning in 2015 as a member of the franco-nigerian “Ife-Sungbo” Project, she conducted archaeological and historical research on the medieval site of Ife in southwestern Nigeria. Prior to joining I Tatti as a postdoctoral fellow, she served as a lecturer in Archaeology of Africa at the University of Paris 1, and held a visiting research fellowship at the Sainsbury Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. Her work focuses on the urban space in tropical West Africa, in particularly the Yoruba area in the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. Beyond topics related to the urban culture, infrastructures, and architecture, she developed an interest on the circulation of objects, practices, and techniques in West Africa before the Atlantic Era.

Project Summary

While the arts and techniques have long been approached through the paradigm of a movement from the Mediterranean world to an 'elsewhere', historiography has too often denied African societies their capacity for technological innovation. In recent years, archaeological research has highlighted the flourishing production of glass beads based on local recipes in the urban centre of Ife, in southwestern Nigeria (11th-14th). Despite the decline of Ife's production, its beads continued to circulate as prestigious goods in the Gulf of Guinea and are frequently mentioned in travel accounts in following centuries. Known as “accori” or “Conte de Terra”, i.e. “beads from the ground”, they were found at the sites of ancient human settlements, dug up and displayed on market stalls, thus returning to the economic circuit. Having become one of the most coveted goods of the Atlantic trade, and aware of this lucrative market, Europeans mass-produced glass beads in Venice and Murano, which could have served as superficial imitations of Ife beads. This research project proposes to study the direct and indirect presence of Italian investors and merchants on Portuguese caravels sailing to the western coast of Africa from the end of the 15th century, as well as the descriptions and objects that may have circulated among the Italian scholars and collectors from the second half of the Quattrocento. By exploring the early interactions between the Italian Renaissance and the West African societies, this project aims to fill gaps in historical understanding of the early Atlantic glass beads trade and contribute to a new perspective on the active role played by African societies in the world-economy.