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Reviewed by:
  • Iron Technology in East Africa: Symbolism, Science, and Archaeology*
  • Colleen Kriger (bio)
Iron Technology in East Africa: Symbolism, Science, and Archaeology. By Peter R. Schmidt. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Pp. xii+328; illustrations, maps, figures, tables, appendixes, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

For over twenty years, Peter Schmidt has been thinking and writing about ironworking in northwestern Tanzania, returning there periodically to engage in archaeological field work and to document contemporary reconstructions of iron smelting operations. He was ambitious and indefatigable from the beginning. Not content to write a dissertation on his archaeological data alone, he set about gathering a wealth of oral evidence as well: oral traditions transcribed by others earlier in this century; variants of traditions that he himself recorded; and oral testimonies about local history and ironworking technology. His aim, a very worthy and admirable one, was to analyze both bodies of evidence, the archaeological and the oral, and to discover possible instances of conjunction or corroboration. In one case, Schmidt literally struck paydirt when his excavation of a site identified by oral traditions as one associated with ironworking yielded remains of what appears to have been a forge dating back to the sixth century b.c.! More generally, he proposed to evaluate these different kinds of evidence together in order to arrive at “new explanations for change and development of an African Iron Age culture from its earliest beginnings to contemporary times” (Peter Schmidt, Historical Archaeology. A Structural Approach in an African Culture [Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978], p. 3).

Building on doctoral and postdoctoral research carried out in the 1970s and 1980s, Schmidt, in this elegantly produced book, comes closer to achieving that goal. This time, the aim is to present a history of iron technology in this part of Africa over the past two thousand to twenty-five hundred years, along with the cultural beliefs that were associated with it. Sandwiched between the introductory and concluding chapters are nine others, six having to do mainly with the technology of smelting (chapters 3 through 8) and three with cultural aspects of ironworking—symbolism in rituals and oral traditions (chapters 2, 9, and 10).

The richness of the descriptive material in the technological chapters will probably be of greatest interest to readers of this journal. Schmidt takes [End Page 401] us to the former Haya kingdoms of Tanzania and through several seasons of iron smelts there, including all the preparations of ore and charcoal, construction of the furnaces, and the actual smelts as they were performed (in these instances by men trying to remember, recover, and redevelop skills that had been abandoned in the early twentieth century). Altogether, the documentation of these operations, combined with lab analyses of ore samples, slag, and bloomery iron, lead Schmidt to propose once again that this particular technology, as developed and practiced in Tanzania, was a distinctive and innovative one. The centerpiece of his technological argument is the well-known “preheating hypothesis,” which continues to be controversial. What is most valuable here, however, is not the argument per se but the wide-ranging discussion of data, offered in sufficient detail to convey how complex and challenging bloomery smelting was and is.

The data are still too sparse and uneven, though, for writing a history of ironworking over the last two thousand years, even in a single location in Africa. Schmidt has a go at it by trying to bridge the ethnoarchaeological gap, that is, by attempting to tie twentieth-century observations and experience to evidence found in the archaeological record. Here again, the contribution lies mostly in the presentation of detailed data from Africa; how they are put to use in argument is less satisfactory. Comparing features of recent smelts with archaeological remains and finding similarities might not suggest technological “continuity” (p. 152), especially when there is a five-hundred-year period in the archaeological record during which there was apparently no iron smelting going on in this location. Schmidt’s evidence is extremely valuable, but he sometimes strains it unnecessarily.

For me, as a historian, the weakest part of the book is the application of structural analysis to multifarious imagery from ritual...

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