Iron production in second millennium AD pastoralist contexts on the Laikipia Plateau, Kenya

Iron has played an important role within East African pastoralist societies for many hundreds of years, yet the means by which iron was produced or obtained by these communities has not been thoroughly documented. The bulk of our understanding is presently based on a limited number of ethnographic and artefact studies, which have tended to focus on the functional and symbolic nature of iron objects themselves. We argue that the research presented here provides the first opportunity to add to this narrow knowledge base by reconstructing the iron production technologies of pastoralist communities in Laikipia, Kenya, using an archaeometallurgical approach. Seven furnaces and one iron-production refuse area were excavated at two discrete workshop sites in Laikipia, central Kenya, that date to the second half of the second millennium AD. The recovered archaeometallurgical materials were analysed using optical microscopy, SEM-EDS and ED-XRF. These techniques revealed that the smelting technologies in question were complex and sophisticated and that they utilised titania-rich black sands and lime-rich charcoal. Whereas the technical approach and raw materials were found to be similar at both sites studied, there was striking stylistic variation in furnace design for no apparent functional reason, which might suggest nuanced differences in the socio-cultural affiliations of the smelters who worked at these sites. This paper explores some of the possible reasons for these differences. In particular, by integrating archaeological data with existing ethnographic and ethnohistoric research from the region, we discuss the technological choices of the smelters and what this might tell us about their identities, as well as considering how future research should best be targeted in order to develop a greater understanding of the organisation of production within pastoralist central Kenya

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Making metal and forging relations: Ironworking in the British Iron Age

This article explores the social significance of metalworking in the British Iron Age, drawing ethnographic analogies with small-scale, pre-industrial communities. It focuses on iron, from the collection of ore to smelting and smithing, challenging the assumption that specialized ironworking was necessarily associated with hierarchical chiefdoms, supported by full-time craft specialists. Instead, it explores more complex ways in which social and political authority might have been associated with craftwork, through metaphorical associations with fertility, skill and exchange. Challenging traditional interpretations of objects such as tools and weapons, it argues that the importance of this craft lay in its dual association with transformative power, both creative and destructive. It suggests that this technology literally made new kinds of metaphorical relationships thinkable , and it explores the implications through a series of case studies ranging from the production and use of iron objects to their destruction and deposition. © 2007 The Author; Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd