Yelwa (Iron Age archaeological site)
An Iron Age archaeological locality on the eastern bank of the Niger near Yauri, Kebbi State, Nigeria, excavated in the 1960s–70s and associated with ceramic and terracotta finds.
The Yelwa site lies on the eastern bank of the River Niger in the area of modern Yauri, Kebbi State, north-western Nigeria, and was investigated during the mid-twentieth-century expansion of Nigerian Iron Age archaeology. Excavations recovered ceramics, iron-working evidence, and terracotta figurative fragments situating the site within the broader northern Nigerian Iron Age horizon, though the full publication record remains limited compared with the better-documented Nok tradition further south.
In the art trade, "Yelwa" has come to function as a residual attribution label for northern Nigerian terracottas that resist confident assignment to Nok, Katsina, or Sokoto categories. This secondary, market-driven usage is archaeologically imprecise: the excavated assemblage at Yelwa itself is modest, and the stylistic conventions of objects attributed to it on the market have not been systematically codified against the excavated material. Collectors and scholars should distinguish sharply between verified excavation provenance from the Yelwa site and the broader, loosely defined market category bearing the same name.