Perhaps I can add a bit to this by noting how quick smelting skills are
lost. Over the past 20 years I've been involved in several attempts to
revive discontinued iron smelting technologies in various regions of
Africa, and I am very familiar with the experiences of others who have
done this. In most cases where smelting has been discontinued for more
than 30 years the revival have not succeeded at first even though
conducted by people who had formerly been experienced smelters. The skills
involved in judging the progress of a smelt without modern analytical
instruments are exceedingly subtle - among them are the sounds of the
furnace, the feel of the charge as probed with an iron bar, the
back-pressure on the bellows (where used) and certainly other criteria
that the persistent questioning of myself and others has failed to elicit.
For this reason I and most others who have recorded ethnographic iron
smelting in Africa regard these as experimental archaeology, not
necessarily representative of prehistoric reality. For an excellent
discussion of the difficulties involved in doing "ethnoarchaeology" of
iron smelting, see Peter Schmidt, Iron Technology in East Africa (Indiana
University Press 1997), especially chapters 3 and 4.
----------------------
David Killick
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology,
University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721-0030.
Phones: office (520)621-8685; laboratory 621-7986; fax 621-2088
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