Innovation, Tradition and Metals at Kilwa Kisiwani

The African Archaeological Review, 1985

Both developmental and diffusionist models for the growth and spread of iron technology in Africa are characterized by a surprising absence of scientific understanding of how that technology developed. Heretofore there has been no basis for an assessment of the cultural and ecological factors that led to technical innovation in Iron Age Africa, for archaeological studies rarely go beyond descriptions of isolated smelting furnaces. Given the complex interaction of human labor, specialized cultural and technological knowledge, raw materials, and thermodynamics involved in smelting, it is not surprising that archaeologists have been stow to develop regional perspectives on iron technology. This paper provides a number of ways to redress past neglect by the study of iron production and innovation in an African region over which there is close chronological control. The new perspectives stress important indigenous innovations, analytical approaches applied to artifacts and structures, experiments on materials, and ethnoarchaeological observations. These are applicable throughout Africa and provide a foundation for understanding African technological innovation and the development and impact of a significant technology on Early Iron Age peoples.

Journal of Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 2023

This paper presents the most extensive archaeometallurgical study of iron-smithing debris excavated in East Africa. It presents an integrated methodology, including morphological, chemical, petrographic, and contextual analysis of iron slag excavated from secondary ironworking contexts. Iron slag from three Swahili sites was analysed-Unguja Ukuu located on the southwestern coast of Zanzibar, and Tumbe and Chwaka situated in the northeast of Pemba Island. The results suggest that Unguja Ukuu smithing is associated with oxidising hearth atmospheres and high amounts of CaO, while slag from Tumbe and Chwaka indicates reducing hearth atmospheres and high silica:alumina ratios, potentially pointing to the use of a flux. Distinct technical traditions can be seen at Unguja Ukuu when compared to Tumbe and Chwaka, suggesting a regional rather than chronological pattern. Temporal continuity is evident throughout the occupation of Unguja Ukuu and between sites of different periods in northwestern Pemba. The spatial distribution of iron slag at these sites suggests that smithing was taking place across the extent of Unguja Ukuu, while slag scatters were more localised and disassociated from domestic contexts at Tumbe and Chwaka. The wealth of information on technological and organisational aspects of smithing obtained during this study indicates that an integrated methodology can yield valuable data for a variety of smithing sites, irrespective of excavation strategies.

Archives, Objects, Places and Landscapes: Multidisciplinary approaches to Decolonised Zimbabwean pasts, 2017

Archaeologists are accustomed to the idea that metallurgy is the domain of men. Anything outside this framework in the recent and distant past has always been considered an exception. This article exposes such an exception among the Murazvo family where, in defiance of the male norm, the chief smith is a woman who performs several livelihood crafts. Circumstances have made her the focal person entrusted with the task of passing on the smithing and several other categories of technology in the family, bequeathing them to her sons, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren. This case goes against most stereotypes in iron working. It challenges the received thinking in ascribing gender roles to metallurgy, as well as other categories of technology and expertise in the past. The chapter brings forth a discussion of the complexity and ambiguity of social relations in technology, and the tendency for the politics of inclusion and exclusion on gender and age axes to shift and become more tenuous. The aim is to foreground especially the world of women as innovative members of past and contemporary societal structures, whose co-authorship of our human past and present, together with men, is not just in procreation, but is daily enacted in many different spheres of life.

Azania:archaeological Research in Africa, 2018

This thesis provides insights into the nature and organization of iron technology associated with past and present communities of Great Zimbabwe in southern Africa. Written accounts, ethnographic enquiries and, results of archaeological field surveys and excavations are combined to provide the first detailed account of Great Zimbabwe's iron production technologies. The existence of a considerable iron industry in Great Zimbabwe with complex and innovative designs and processes of iron smelting is established. Evidence includes tap slags, natural draft furnaces, one with a unique rectangular morphology, and the exploitation of manganese-rich iron ores or fluxes. Moderate to low levels of iron oxide in slag samples point to large-scale production of good quality iron for an extensive market at some time in the past of Great Zimbabwe. Iron slags, possible bloom pieces and broken tuyeres are examined using standard archaeometallurgical laboratory techniques to establish the decisions and choices underlying technology and pyro-metallurgical processes in and between sites. The results are explained using theoretical concepts of social practice and agency to address the worldviews, social values and beliefs of iron related practices in Great Zimbabwe over time. The study provides an alternative angle for approaching the social complexity of Great Zimbabwe (with its peak in the 12 th-16 th centuries AD), previously understood from the perspective of its spectacular architecture. Evidence of primary and secondary production activities in domestic and specialized settings outside settlements suggests a greater spatiotemporal complexity and ambiguity of the organization of technology than previously thought. Iron production in domestic contexts provided an inclusive space, creating the possibility for transformation of not just materials, but also women and children into social agents of technology, adding an alternative and more socially embedded perspective of technology in Africa.

The development of metallurgy was a turning point in human history in West Africa. The use of metal tools allowed humans to have some control over their environment, and enabled them to transform their settlement patterns, political organizations, and modes of economic production and warfare. Researchers have often speculated that metallurgy techniques were developed earlier in other parts of Africa and the Mediterranean and then introduced through processes of diffusion from outside influences into the cultures of West Africa. West African skills of metal working – and particularly iron working -- were later transferred to locations in the Americas as a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In this article, I provide evidence of early metallurgy developments within West Africa itself, as seen through a focus on the practice of metallurgy by the Nok culture of central Nigeria. Finally, as to better understand the importance of metallurgy, I discuss the potential discourse between West African archaeologists and those that study African diasporas.

World of Iron, 2013

Annual Review of Anthropology, 1993

African Archaeological Review, 2013

This paper discusses Early Ironworking (EIW) pottery traditions of the southern coast of Tanzania. The beginning of the trend toward settled village communities in large parts of southeastern Africa was assumed to result from the southward movements of Bantu speakers who are presumed to have introduced the earliest evidence of domestication and sedentary behaviour, as well as iron-and pottery-making skills. The corollary of this was that the earliest settled villages of the coast were considered to have been of the Kwale tradition, which is a coastal variant of EIW ceramics that dates from the third and fourth centuries AD on the northern and central coasts of eastern Africa. Recent studies on the southern coast of Tanzania have revealed an EIW pottery tradition with a strong resemblance to the Nkope tradition of the southwestern interior, corresponding to the woodland belt on the southern edge of the equatorial forest zone. The temporal pattern of this tradition does not suggest any direction of movement but rather an axis of interactions between the coast and interior, at least since the last millennium BC. Résumé Cette communication traite des débuts de la tradition de la poterie à l'âge du fer sur la côte sud de la Tanzanie. Les origines de l'installation de villages dans le Sud Est de l'Afrique sont essentiellement dues à des populations Bantoues qui ont laissé derrière eux les premières traces dans la région de domestication et de sédentarisation ainsi que de l'usage du fer et de la poterie. En lien avec cette théorie, l'on considère que les premiers occupants de la côte Est ont été ceux de l'époque KWALE aux 3ème et 4éme siècles avant notre ère, précisément au Nord Est de la côte africaine. De récentes études sur la côte Sud ont révélé aussi une tradition ancienne de poterie de l'âge de fer ressemblant beaucoup à la tradition NKOPE du Sud Ouest de l'intérieur du continent. Cela correspond à la « ceinture forestière » (woodland belt) du sud de la forêt équatoriale. Les évolutions temporelles de cette tradition ne suggèrent pas vraiment de déplacement ou même une direction dans l'évolution mais plutôt un axe d'interaction entre la côte et l'intérieur des terres, au moins depuis le dernier millénaire de notre ère.

The Nyanga agricultural complex through its cultivation terraces and ridges represents one of the most intensified agricultural systems in southern African prehistory. In such a well developed system of land management and use, iron tools played a crucial role in clearing the land for cultivation as well as for domestic building purposes. Important to this dimension is the need to understand iron production and use in prehistoric societies. This paper aims for the first time to look at iron technology in the Nyanga agricultural complex through an initial analysis of iron extraction remains such as ore, slag, and furnace fragments. As a result, the technical data obtained will be used to develop hypotheses which future research can engage. This paper is a preliminary statement toward developing an understanding of iron production to meet various purposes from the deeper past to the historical period.

Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa, 2015

Iron has played an important role within East African pastoralist societies for many hundreds of years, yet the means by which iron was produced or obtained by these communities has not been thoroughly documented. The bulk of our understanding is presently based on a limited number of ethnographic and artefact studies, which have tended to focus on the functional and symbolic nature of iron objects themselves. We argue that the research presented here provides the first opportunity to add to this narrow knowledge base by reconstructing the iron production technologies of pastoralist communities in Laikipia, Kenya, using an archaeometallurgical approach. Seven furnaces and one iron-production refuse area were excavated at two discrete workshop sites in Laikipia, central Kenya, that date to the second half of the second millennium AD. The recovered archaeometallurgical materials were analysed using optical microscopy, SEM-EDS and ED-XRF. These techniques revealed that the smelting technologies in question were complex and sophisticated and that they utilised titania-rich black sands and lime-rich charcoal. Whereas the technical approach and raw materials were found to be similar at both sites studied, there was striking stylistic variation in furnace design for no apparent functional reason, which might suggest nuanced differences in the socio-cultural affiliations of the smelters who worked at these sites. This paper explores some of the possible reasons for these differences. In particular, by integrating archaeological data with existing ethnographic and ethnohistoric research from the region, we discuss the technological choices of the smelters and what this might tell us about their identities, as well as considering how future research should best be targeted in order to develop a greater understanding of the organisation of production within pastoralist central Kenya.