The Ife heads are among the finest sculptures produced anywhere in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, and the first European to see them concluded that Africans had not made them.
The works. Between roughly the twelfth and fifteenth centuries the Ife court produced heads and figures in brass, copper alloy and terracotta of a naturalism with no close parallel in the region. They are individualised, finely modelled, many scarified with fine vertical striations, and cast by lost-wax technique with a control of wall thickness that indicates a long-established workshop tradition rather than experiment.
Frobenius. Leo Frobenius reached Ife in 1910 and obtained a brass head and other material. He concluded that the works were Greek, and that Ife was a surviving remnant of Atlantis, specifically that it was the site of Plato's lost civilisation, and that the head represented Poseidon. His reasoning was explicit and did not conceal itself: the sculptures were too accomplished to be African, therefore they were not African, therefore an explanation had to be found elsewhere. The theory was taken seriously in Europe for years. It is the same manoeuvre performed at Great Zimbabwe and at Nan Madol, and it is a good illustration that pseudo-archaeology is not a harmless eccentricity: it is generally a device for removing an achievement from the people who achieved it.
The correction. The Wunmonije Compound finds of 1938, a group of brass heads uncovered during building work near the palace, made the position untenable, and subsequent work by Frank Willett and others established the chronology, the alloys and the technique. The Ife corpus is the product of an Ife tradition, connected to the later Benin bronzes rather than to anything Mediterranean, and dated by excavation rather than by assumption.
Where they are. Material Frobenius removed went to Germany, and colonial-era removals dispersed pieces further; the British Museum holds Ife material, as do other European collections. The larger part of the known corpus is in Nigeria, principally at the National Museum in Ife. Return of the pieces held abroad has been raised repeatedly and is unresolved, a separate question from the Benin Bronzes, though usually discussed alongside them.
The city is not a museum. Ile-Ife is where Yoruba tradition places the creation of the world and the descent of Oduduwa, from whom every Yoruba oba traces the right to rule. The Ooni of Ife reigns, festivals run, Ifa divination is practised, and for several million people in Nigeria, Brazil, Cuba and the United States the town is the ritual point of origin rather than an archaeological site.