Iron metallurgy in Africa

Common card · No. 458584

Iron metallurgy in Africa concerns the origin and development of ferrous metallurgy on the African continent. Whereas the development of iron metallurgy in North Africa and the Horn closely mirrors that of the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean region, the three-age system is ill-suited to Sub-Saharan Africa, where copper metallurgy generally does not precede iron working. Following the beginning of iron metallurgy in Western and Central Africa by 2500 BC - 1000 BC, and possibly earlier, agriculturalists of the Chifumbaze Complex would ultimately introduce the technology to Eastern and Southern Africa by the end of the first millennium AD. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, radiocarbon and thermoluminescence dating of artifacts associated with iron metallurgy in Nigeria and the Central African Republic have yielded dates as early as the third millennium BC. Although a number of scholars have scrutinized these dates on methodological and theoretical grounds, others contend...

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