Ironworking reaches the eastern Bantu communities by 700 BCE

Around 700 BCE the knowledge of iron smelting began moving out from the early Great Lakes Bantu to the rest of the early Mashariki, the eastern branch of Bantu speakers. The Great Lakes region is where Schmidt and Avery documented prehistoric smelting of an advanced kind, and it acted here as the transmission node, the place from which furnace technique travelled on to communities spread across a wide stretch of eastern Africa. Ehret dates that stage from the linguistic and archaeological record together. He first set the finding out in a lecture at Columbia University in September 1974, added evidence from South Sudan when the Society of Africanist Archaeologists met at UCLA in March 1992, and published it later still. Nearly two decades separate the finding from the article. I keep the delay in view because it says something about the discipline. The resistance to African technical achievement that Schmidt later wrote about was already in the rooms where these papers were read.