Did They or Didn't They Invent It? Iron in Sub-Saharan Africa

Stanley B. Alpern

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Metallurgy and Cultural Artifacts Archaeology and Rock Art Studies African Studies and Geopolitics

Abstract

Judging from a number of recent publications, the long-running debate over the origins of iron smelting in sub-Saharan Africa has been resolved… in favor of those advocating independent invention. For Gérard Quéchon, the French archeologist to whom we owe very early dates for iron metallurgy from the Termit Massif in Niger, “indisputably, in the present state of knowledge, the hypothesis of an autochthonous invention is convincing.” According to Eric Huysecom, a Belgian-born archeologist, “[o]ur present knowledge allows us … to envisage one or several independent centres of metal innovation in sub-Saharan Africa.” Hamady Bocoum, a Senegalese archeologist, asserts that “more and more numerous datings are pushing back the beginning of iron production in Africa to at least the middle of the second millennium BC, which would make it one of the world's oldest metallurgies.” He thinks that “in the present state of knowledge, the debate [over diffusion vs. independent invention] is closed for want of conclusive proof accrediting any of the proposed transmission channels [from the north].” The American archeologist Peter R. Schmidt tells us “the hypothesis for independent invention is currently the most viable among the multitude of diffusionist hypotheses.” Africanists other than archeologists are in agreement. For Basil Davidson, the foremost popularizer of African history, “African metallurgical skills [were] locally invented and locally developed.” The American linguist Christopher Ehret says Africa south of the Sahara, it now seems, was home to a separate and independent invention of iron metallurgy … To sum up the available evidence, iron technology across much of sub-Saharan Africa has an African origin dating to before 1000 BCE.

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References

1998Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 1994The Archaeology of Africa: food, metals and towns 1963Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries 1948Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries 1977A History of Metallurgy 1999Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 2003The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 2019Anthropology: Race, Language, Culture, Psychology, Prehistory

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2009Cairo to Cape: The Spread of Metallurgy Through Eastern and Southern Africa 2012Archaeometallurgy: The Study of Preindustrial Mining and Metallurgy 2009Early West African Metallurgies: New Data and Old Orthodoxy 2013The Archaeology and Ethnography of Central Africa 2016A global perspective on the pyrotechnologies of Sub-Saharan Africa 2009Pastoralist iron production on the Laikipia Plateau, Kenya: wider implications for archaeometallurgical studies

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