Jos

The high country around Jos is part of a plateau of hills and river valleys, home to Berom, Anaguta and Afizere communities. Its streams carried deposits of tin, which local miners and smiths worked long before the great mines of a later age. The metal could be made into ornaments, and by the eighteenth century tin from the region reached trading posts on the West African coast. The plateau's settlements belonged to a varied landscape of peoples and languages, distinct from the surrounding plains.