African smelters make steel two thousand years before Bessemer

Peter Schmidt's excavations in the Great Lakes region of Africa found furnaces that reached temperatures high enough to bring carbon steel straight out of the smelt, and they were doing it by the close of the first millennium BCE. Steel in a single step is a hard thing. Europe managed it in the nineteenth century with the Bessemer converter, two thousand years later. Chinese smelters had the capability by the eleventh century CE, well after the African furnaces. The quality gap lasted. When European iron began arriving on the West African coast in the fifteenth century and after, African smiths kept using metal from their own smelters for real tools. The Portuguese, who controlled the coastal trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, bought iron from producers in present day Sierra Leone and Liberia and carried it up the coast to Guinea and Senegal, where they exchanged it for gold, for leather, and for people. The men selling technological superiority were shipping African iron because it beat what they had at home.

By about 250 BCE, on the radiocarbon evidence Rouse reviews, the Cedrosan Saladoid migration had reached the northern West Indies. The colonists were selective about where they stopped. They favoured high, mountainous islands, which hold rain, carry rivers and support the luxuriant forest their farming needed. Flat, dry islands were passed over. That preference explains a good deal of later Caribbean settlement, including on Hispaniola, whose mountains and well watered valleys made it one of the most heavily populated islands in the region by 1492. This is farming logic applied to an archipelago by people who had crossed open water to reach it. They knew which land would grow their crops and they chose accordingly, across a chain more than a thousand kilometres long. The indigenous history of Haiti begins with decisions of this kind, taken two thousand years before the Spanish arrived and recorded now in charcoal, potsherds and dates.

Latin speakers had a single word family for substances that acted in ways nobody could watch. Uenenum covered a potent herb, a magical influence and a poison, and out of it came a verb meaning to bewitch or to infect, a noun for the act itself, and uenefucus, a word for the person who did such things, used of men and of women. In the late republic the Roman state grew worried enough about those people to pass a law in 81 BCE against causing sudden or unexpected death by concealed means, whether the means were chemical or magical. The law treated the two as one offence. Sixteen centuries later, courts in Martinique and Suriname were still hearing cases in which nobody could say whether the accused had used a plant, a powder or a spell, and the statutes they used descended from this one. The vocabulary carried the ambiguity across two thousand years.