The development of iron technology in precolonial western Uganda

Abstract

The local production of iron was an important technology in eastern Africa up until the earlier twentieth century, when the use and reuse of imported iron overtook vernacular smelting industries and cemented their decline. Prior to this, the utilisation of local ores had produced iron for agricultural implements, household tools and weapons, serving the needs of many generations of farmers and herders across the region. The smelters of western Uganda enjoyed a particularly esteemed reputation in recent history, especially among their neighbours in Buganda. Prior to archaeometallurgical research undertaken in 2007, little was known about the technologies upon which this reputation was fostered. This paper presents an overview of the results of six months of fieldwork in Uganda and subsequent archaeometallurgical analysis, which together revealed the complexities of smelting in Mwenge, western Uganda, between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries. Technological reconstructions indicate that some iron producers in the region were supplementing the iron ores in their smelts with an additional manganese-rich material, imparting a tangible effect on the process and outcomes of these smelting episodes, hypothetically increasing the metal yield and improving operating parameters. Although such harnessing of beneficial manganese-rich minerals was an unexpected and unusual finding, it correlates with existing ethnoarchaeological and ethnohistorical data. Through these avenues, and building upon social approaches to iron technologies, it has been possible to explore this variation in the technological record of western Uganda in the context of the known history of the region.

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