Managing Epidemics in Ancestral Yorùbá Towns and Cities: “Sacred Groves” as Isolation Sites

The COVID-19 pandemic is firing up our imagination about how to account for the past epidemics in archaeological contexts. This essay is a reflection on some of the historical cases of epidemic outbreaks in Yorùbá history, and what we can learn from social memory, oral traditions, and recent eyewitness accounts on how microbial attacks were managed in ancestral Yorùbá urban centers. Malignant microbes usually thrive in the kind of settlement configurations—dense towns and cities—that supported the preferred sociopolitical organization among the Yorùbá for over a millennium. Sacred groves were incorporated into the ancestral Yorùbá urban planning. They served many roles, including as isolation centers for managing epidemic outbreaks. Such isolation sites are difficult to identify in archaeological contexts without the aid of historical sources. However, contemplating how these special spaces were embedded in the past Yorùbá cultural lives could broaden our imagination of social regeneration processes in times of crisis (e.g., infectious disease).