Tomos Llywelyn Evans is Assistant Professor of Art History and Archaeology and African and African-American Studies at WashU. He has a BA in Archaeology and Anthropology from the University of Cambridge, an MA in African Studies with Heritage from University College London, and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the College of William & Mary, with finishing fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC.
Tomos works on the archaeology of southern Nigeria, conducting field research at Sungbo’s Eredo, a 100-mile-long linear earthwork said to be Africa’s largest single monument, as well as archival research in Nigeria, the UK, the US, and South Africa. He explores questions of the chronologies, construction, and evolving functions and meanings of Sungbo’s Eredo for the Ìjèbú-Yorùbá (c. 14th to 20th centuries AD), and more broadly works on reconstructing and interpreting the unpublished excavations of past archaeologists who conducted excavations at important sites in Nigeria, including Ilé-Ifè, Benin City, and elsewhere. He has also published on histories of the expropriation of art objects from Nigeria during the British colonial period, and is involved in research on the colonial history of looting and repatriation in British West Africa during the early 20th century. Tomos’s work has been supported by grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, American Philosophical Society, and Explorer’s Club Washington Group. He teaches classes on the Holocene archaeology and art of the African continent (especially West, Central, and Southern Africa), and on African critical heritage studies.