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Ancient African Metallurgy: The Socio-Cultural Context. Joseph O. Vogel, ed. New York: AltaMira Press, 2000.294 pp.
EUGENIA HERBERT
Mount Holyoke College
At a conference called "Iron Age in the Mediterranean Basin" held two years ago in Geneva, Africanists present were agreeably surprised to find that archaeometallurgical research in Africa was as advanced as that of any other area discussed, in most cases more advanced-and the Mediterranean Basin was elastically defined to include not only all of Africa but even Wales! African metallurgy, in fact, has been something of a growth industry in recent years, not only for archaeologists but also for historians, anthropologists, and even art historians. One opens Ancient African Metallurgy: The Socio-Cultural Context, then, with much anticipation, hoping to find either the results of new research or a comprehensive and accessible synthesis of the current state of the field, or, in the best of all possible worlds, both.
The book consists of long chapters by four distinguished archaeologists: Augustin Holl, Michael Bisson, Philip de Barros, and Terry Childs, with a short foreword by the editor, Joseph Vogel. Holl and de Barros deal primarily with iron metallurgy, Bisson with copper working, and Childs presents a verbatim transcription of interviews with an elderly Toro smith in Uganda from the mid- 1990s.
The lead-off chapter by Holl is entitled "Metals and Precolonial African Society." He devotes a good deal of space to the thorny question of origins, but in the end has little new to add. He lists the early dates for iron working from sites in the Termit Massif (second half of the second millennium B.C.) but rather surprisingly does not discuss their full implications. Since they were obtained from seeds rather than charcoal, they avoid the 11 old wood" problem that has made other...