Iron production in second millennium AD pastoralist contexts on the Laikipia Plateau, Kenya

Abstract

Iron has played an important role within east African pastoralist societies for many hundreds of years, yet the means by which iron was produced or obtained by these communities has not been thoroughly documented. The bulk of our understanding is presently based on a limited number of ethnographic and artefact studies, which have tended to focus on the functional and symbolic nature of iron objects themselves. We argue that the research presented here has provided the first opportunity to add to this narrow knowledge base by reconstructing the iron production technologies of pastoralist communities in Laikipia, Kenya using an archaeometallurgical approach.Seven furnaces and one iron-production refuse area were excavated at two discrete workshop sites in Laikipia, central Kenya that dated to the second half of the second millennium AD. The recovered archaeometallurgical materials were analysed using optical microscopy, SEM-EDS and ED-XRF. These revealed that the smelting technologies in question were complex and sophisticated and utilised titania-rich black sands and lime-rich charcoal. Whereas the technical approach and raw materials were found to be similar at both sites studied, there was striking stylistic variation in furnace design for no apparent functional reason, which might suggest nuanced differences in the socio-cultural affiliations of the smelters that worked at these sites. This paper explores some of the possible reasons for these differences. In particular, by integrating archaeological data with existing ethnographic and ethnohistoric research from the region, we discuss the technological choices of the past smelters and what this might tell us about their identities, as well as considering how future research should best be targeted in order to develop a greater understanding of the organisation of production within pastoralist central Kenya.

Late Holocene environmental change and anthropogenic: Ecosystem interaction on the Laikipia Plateau, Kenya

“…Some clear archaeological evidence for these trends comes from the site of Deloraine (Ambrose et al 1984 ) in the Rift Valley c. 200 km to the south. Traces of iron smelting activity have also been recorded at various locations across the Laikipia Plateau and the adjacent Leroghi Plateau, although dates from those sites that have been excavated are slightly later, clustering around the last three to four centuries (Iles and Martinón-Torres 2009 ; Iles and Lane 2015 ). Older examples of iron smelting, nonetheless, may await discovery through targeted archaeological fieldwork.…”

First archeomagnetic data from Kenya and Chad: Analysis of iron furnaces from Mount Kenya and Guéra Massif

“…Furnaces 2 and 3 (KAM1-2 and KAM1-3 in our nomenclature), partially excavated, have similar morphology, brick sizes and shapes but they are smaller in size. These differences highlight the complexity of the smelting technologies in use (Iles and Lane, 2015;Iles and Torres, 2009) and it can be noted that the morphology of the excavated furnaces differs from the ethnographic furnaces as described by J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f Brown (1995). M'Mbogori (2013) points out that the smelters of Kamuturi 1 may have affinities with past communities who lived in this region before the arrival of Bantu groups.…”

Le sel et le fer au cœur des échanges, de la circulation et du commerce dans la région des Grands Lacs à l’époque précoloniale

“…Plus au sud, les Kamba se fournissaient non seulement en sables ferrifères mais aussi en pisolithes ferrugineuses dans les collines de Machakos et de Kilungu, situées à 90 km au sud-est de Nairobi (Krapf 1853). Enfin, sur le plateau de Laikipia, les métallurgistes pouvaient trouver de l'ilménite riche en titane (FeTiO3) dans les ravinements (Iles & Lane 2015).…”

“…Cette vision qui opposait « agriculteurs-métallurgistes » aux « pasteurs sans métallurgie » est rééquilibrée grâce aux travaux archéologiques qui se sont multipliés depuis une vingtaine d'années dans la région centrale du pays. Le cas le mieux documenté est celui de groupes de langue masaï avec une métallurgie attestée depuis la fin du xv e sur le plateau de Laikipia (Lane 2015), et probablement autour du xviii e siècle dans le district de Samburu (Larick 1986) où une cinquantaine de sites de réduction a été répertoriée, sans qu'une parenté soit cependant établie. Dans les deux cas, les forgerons ont un statut ambigu, voire contradictoire.…”