1000 BCE to 1000 CE · Africanspan
Iron leaves the Great Lakes for the Atlantic by three separate roads
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At the close of the first millennium BCE the Mashariki Bantu expansions carried iron working across eastern and southeastern Africa. From no later than the middle of that millennium the technology also began moving the other way, westward from the African Great Lakes, across Bantu speaking central Africa, from the Western Rift all the way to the Atlantic. Mapping the words for iron, forging and tools shows three distinct lines of travel. One ran through the equatorial rainforest, along the middle Congo and north of it. One followed the Sankuru River country at the southern edge of the forest. The third crossed the savanna belt below the forest. West of the point where the Ubangi meets the Congo, the northern line met a separate spread coming south out of Cameroon and the western Central African Republic. What that adds up to is a technology radiating in every direction from a central African source, through African languages, African migration routes and African trade, filling a continent by several roads at once.
A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.