Before 1800 BCE · Africanapproximate
Iron may have first appeared as an accident in a potter's firing pit
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African potters commonly fire their work in pits dug into the ground. Across the woodland savanna that runs from West Africa to the eastern edge of the Central African Republic, the ground is lateritic and heavy with iron oxide. The archaeologist Merrick Posnansky proposed that firing at high temperature in such pits would have produced small pieces of iron out of the soil itself, repeatedly, until somebody noticed. That is a plausible route to the discovery, and it puts the origin of the technology inside a craft that women had run for thousands of years. What happened next is a familiar sequence. Men took up smelting, built the rituals and symbols that assigned the work to them, and made the arrangement look ancient and proper. Women kept essential roles regardless, mining the ore, and in southern Africa and probably elsewhere shaping the ceramic tuyeres that carried air into the furnaces and the crucibles used for copper. The foundation was women's. The credit went elsewhere.
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