Pre-1800 BCE: (The Laterite Hypothesis, How Pottery Firing in Iron-Rich Soils May Have Led to the Accidental Discovery of Iron: African Potters Widely Firing…

Pre-1800 BCE: (The Laterite Hypothesis, How Pottery Firing in Iron-Rich Soils May Have Led to the Accidental Discovery of Iron: African Potters Widely Firing Ceramics in Pits Dug into Lateritic Soils with Very High Iron Oxide Content, Merrick Posnansky’s Proposal That Higher-Temperature Firings Incidentally Produced Bits of Iron from the Soil, Gender Re-Entering the Story as Men Took Up Smelting of a Material That Was a By-Product of Women’s Technology, and Women Continuing to Play Roles as Ore Miners and Makers of Ceramic Tuyeres and Crucibles): Ceramic technology may once again be implicated in explaining how Africans discovered iron. Widely across Africa, potters fire their ceramics in pits dug into the earth. And a great many areas in the woodland savanna belt extending from West Africa to the eastern edges of the Central African Republic have lateritic soils with very high iron oxide content. The archaeologist Merrick Posnansky and others have proposed that pottery firing at higher temperatures led to the incidental production, probably on repeated occasions, of bits of iron from the high-iron lateritic soil. In that way, iron would have come to the attention of people in that region. And at this point gender enters the story again. Men rather than women were apparently the ones who first began to find uses for this new kind of material, a by-product of women’s technology. Everywhere across Africa it was men who took up smelting and who developed the rituals and symbols that validated a gendered distribution of labor in the working of iron. Nevertheless, women widely continued to have roles in the new technology, often as the miners of iron ore and, in southern Africa and probably elsewhere, applying their ceramic skills to such tasks as fashioning the ceramic tuyeres carrying oxygen from the bellows into the smelting furnaces and also the crucibles used in the processing of copper. So the story of iron in Africa is also, inescapably, a story about gender. Women invented the foundational technology. Men appropriated the downstream application. Women continued to contribute essential skilled labor. And the rituals that men created around smelting served in part to legitimize a redistribution of technological authority that had originally belonged to women.