700 BCE: (The Initial Spread of Ironworking via the Great Lakes Bantu — The Arrow on Map 2.6 Pointing to “700 BCE” Marking the Initial Stage of the Spread of…

700 BCE: (The Initial Spread of Ironworking via the Great Lakes Bantu — The Arrow on Map 2.6 Pointing to “700 BCE” Marking the Initial Stage of the Spread of Ironworking via the Early Great Lakes Bantu to the Rest of the Early Mashariki Bantu Communities, Ehret Having First Presented These Findings in a Lecture at Columbia University in September 1974 and Then with Additional Findings for South Sudan at the Society of Africanist Archaeologists Meeting at UCLA in March 1992): The date of 700 BCE marks the initial stage of the spread of ironworking from the early Great Lakes Bantu to the rest of the early Mashariki Bantu communities. Ehret first presented these findings in a lecture at Columbia University in September 1974, and then again with additional findings for South Sudan at the biennial Society of Africanist Archaeologists meeting at UCLA in March 1992, before finally publishing them as an article. The note adds a specific date — 700 BCE — to the diffusion pathway of ironworking through the Bantu-speaking world. The Great Lakes region, where Schmidt and Avery documented advanced prehistoric iron smelting technology, served as the transmission node through which ironworking knowledge passed to the broader Mashariki (Eastern) Bantu communities. The note also reveals that Ehret’s identification of this pathway predates its publication by nearly two decades — a reminder that the pace of scholarly publication can lag far behind the pace of scholarly discovery, and that the resistance to acknowledging African technological achievement that Schmidt later documented was already present in the 1970s and 1990s when Ehret first presented these findings.