Look Around

Farming, iron, cloth and glass; the market system and the women who ran it; cowrie money; and the routes that tied Yorubaland to the Sahara and the Atlantic.

How the sixteen-cowrie system, kola divination, and the Fon, Ewe, Cuban and Brazilian relatives relate to Ifá, and why formal similarity is weaker evidence than it looks.

The Yoruba numeral system, which is genuinely unusual among the world's number systems in how heavily it subtracts and how many ways it lets you say one number, plus counting practice, measurement, and what can honestly be said about mathematics in Ifá.

Nine Yorùbá proverbs datable by internal evidence to the pre-colonial cowrie-currency economy or to the early colonial period, kept current in speech as fixed idiom for amounts and situations no living speaker has transacted in.

An analysis of precolonial Yoruba monetary systems, cowrie inflation mechanics, credit institutions, and the colonial transition to British sterling.

An analysis of the traditional Yoruba vigesimal and subtractive numeral system, cowrie currency computation, and anthropomorphic and relational units of measurement.