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Ancient African iron production
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In archaeology as in biology it can be very difficult to distinguish true from false homologies. Just as similarities between species may or may not indicate a common ancestry, so can common technologies or agricultural practices derive from the same source or arise independently when different cultures seek to solve the same problem.
Archaeologists have long held that ironmaking technology spread by diffusion from a single point of origin. The smelting of iron is thought to have been reduced to practice by the Hittites in what is now Turkey around 1600 to 1200 B.C., and the techniques then to have slowly migrated outward, reaching China, Britain and Nigeria during the first millennium B.C. Moreover, metalworking cultures were thought to progress through a metallic sequence, beginning with pure copper and moving from there to arsenical copper, tin, bronze and iron.
But Africa never fit this model very well. For one thing, unlike Europe and the Mediterranean region, Africa experienced no Bronze Age. Africans confronted the challenges of iron smelting directly, without the handicaps and advantages of metallurgical skills based on bronze-working. Only recently, however, have we begun to appreciate how this difference in metallurgical history led o the development of modes of experimentation that are distinctive to Africa.
One of us (Schmidt) began to question the application of the diffusion theory to the internal development of iron production in Africa W years ago, when he analyzed slags, glasslike waste products of smelting, found during excavation of an Early Iron Age site near Lake Victoria in northwest Tanzania. (In Africa the Early Iron Age is considered to have extended from 6000 B.C. to 600 A.D.) When the ancient slags were reheated, they became spongy at temperatures well above the highest temperature thought to have been achieved in antiquity.
The matter might have...