Agency, Structure, and Social Change in Nigerian Prehistoric Societies: A Critical Realist Approach

The relationship between individual human agency and social structural constraints is a foundational theoretical problem in the social sciences, yet its explicit application as an analytical framework in Nigerian prehistoric archaeology remains underdeveloped despite the field's growing sophistication in material culture analysis and chronological modelling. This dissertation applies a critical realist theoretical framework to the analysis of social change in three prehistoric Nigerian societies, demonstrating the interpretive value of a theory of agency and structure that avoids the twin reductions of methodological individualism and structural determinism. The study's theoretical development draws on Roy Bhaskar's critical realism, Anthony Giddens's structuration theory, and Pierre Bourdieu's practice theory, synthesizing these into a framework termed structured agency in archaeological context that specifies the conditions under which individual practice is analytically recoverable from the material record and the mechanisms through which accumulated individual practices produce structural transformation over archaeological timescales. Three case studies are developed: the transition from non-hierarchical to hierarchical social organization in the Nok Cultural Zone between 500 BCE and 200 CE; the adoption and transformation of Islamic material practice in Kano State between 900 CE and 1400 CE; and the negotiation of gender identities in Middle Belt Iron Age communities. For each case, the structured agency framework generates specific hypotheses about the material signatures of agentive practice that are tested against available archaeological assemblages. The dissertation argues that critical realism provides the most epistemologically coherent available foundation for the science of the past, making an original contribution to both social theory and Nigerian archaeology. Keywords: agency, structure, critical realism, social change, Nigerian prehistoric societies.