Istwa Nou

In the far north of Africa metallurgy followed the sequence textbooks expect. Copper arrived in Egypt in the fourth millennium BCE, as native metal from deposits in Sinai, first for ornament and then in earnest as Egypt entered the Bronze Age early in the third millennium. Slightly later, and two thousand five hundred kilometres away in the Aïr mountains of present day Niger, another people started again from nothing. They most likely spoke a Nilo-Saharan language of the western Sahelian group. The archaeologist Augustin Holl reads the earliest Aïr copper sites, running from 2500 to 1500 BCE, as a long period of experiment with furnace designs, settling by 1500 BCE into a mature and standard technology. Copper then went into trade. Work by the historian Constanze Weise on borrowed vocabulary puts Aïr copper in northwestern Nigeria before 1000 BCE, and by the ninth century BCE the smelting technique itself had travelled a thousand kilometres further west into southern Mauritania.

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.