Ilé-Ifè, in southwestern Nigeria, was sub-Saharan Africa's first major city and the sacred capital of the Yoruba. In 1910 German collector Leo Frobenius became the first European to see its lifelike bronze and terracotta portrait heads, and was so struck by their realism that he decided they must be relics of Atlantis rather than African work. This film follows the archaeologists now piecing together what actually happened there: Gérard Chouin builds a chronology from pottery shards and tiled floor fragments, while Nigerian archaeologist Babatunde Babalola leads a search around the ruins of a glass-bead factory whose products became the city's economic backbone and a template copied by later kingdoms across the region. Interviews with both researchers and footage of excavation sites trace the city's rise through trade and craft monopoly, then its decline after roughly 1400 AD, a collapse some scholars attribute to plague. The Portuguese arrival in 1471 and the transatlantic slave trade that followed close the story for good.