Istwa Nou

The spread of the early iron smelting sites carries two implications. The first concerns place. The pattern of the distribution makes it likely that the people who worked out the technology lived somewhere in the fifteen hundred kilometres of woodland savanna between central Nigeria and the far northwestern fringe of East Africa. The second concerns time. Sites were already scattered across that enormous stretch three thousand years ago, and a technology takes generations to travel that far, so the founding workshops should date centuries before 1000 BCE. Both expectations have since been tested. In the last two decades archaeologists have found earlier African ironworking than anything previously recorded, and the finds sit inside the predicted zone. Ôboui, in the western Central African Republic, is one of them. This is the pattern that keeps repeating in Ehret's field. A prediction is made from vocabulary and distribution, someone digs in the indicated place, and the dates come back older than the standard account allows.