Metals and Metallurgists in Sub-Saharan Africa: Three Case Studies

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With National Science Foundation support, Dr. David Killick and his colleagues will pursue three related anthropological projects which will shed new light on past and present metal working practices in sub Saharan Africa. What links the three is the examination of the relationship between metalworking technology and the ability to use such information to sidelight on social organization. In a first study Dr. Killick will examine the techniques used to work iron in the Mandara region of Cameroon and Nigeria. While prehistorically many sub-Saharan peoples smelted and worked iron to produce a range of artifacts, in very few instances have these practices continued into modern times. In the Mandara region anthropologists have observed and videotaped two instances of iron smelting and collected information about many more. Dr. Killick will coordinate and synthesize the data which has been collected. He will also conduct metallurgical analyses of the slags which were produced and the finished products. One major goal of the work is to examine the relationship between ethnic affiliation and metallurgical technology and the extent to which specific techniques are ethnically determined. Because archaeologists work primarily with the material byproducts of human behavior and attempt to reconstruct social organization through such remains, the insights which Dr. Killick will provide will be a great methodological interest. Secondly, Dr. Killick and colleagues will analyze a body of data collected at archaeological sites in northern South Africa. These include finished metal products and slags which date to the last 2,000 years. Archaeologists wish to reconstruct the social organization of such Iron Age societies which gave rise to the Zulu empire and other ethnographically known groups. Because the geology of the region is well known and iron ore deposits vary in chemical composition, it is possible to examine the results and byproducts of smelting and match archaeologically recovered objects with ore source. On this basis it is then possible to reconstruct trade networks and gain insight into large scale social and economic organization. The research team will undertake such an analysis and also reconstruct prehistoric southern African metal working techniques. In a third part of this project the research group will examine a series of materials recovered from archaeological contexts on the East Coast of Africa. Swahili culture which is dominant in this region consists of a mix of African and Islamic elements and it appears that several thousand years ago traders from the Near East settled in this region. Anthropologists are very interested in the mechanisms which underly culture contact and interaction and in the Swahili case several models have been proposed. It is unclear to what extent, over millennia, interaction has occurred and whether the `immigrants` remained culturally and materially distinct. Through the analysis of metal objects Dr. Killick hopes to gain insight into this question. Since the smelting technologies of the Near East and Eastern Africa are quite distinct, and it should be possible to determine whether they are blended or remain separate on the East African coast. This research is important for several reasons. It will help to develop a robust methodological tool which will help scientists to gain insight into past social behavior. It will help to answer a series of interesting areal questions and provide data of interest to many archaeologists.