Kings, Cattle and Blacksmiths: Royal Insignia and Religious Symbolism in the Interlacustrine States

Sassoon, Hamo

doi:10.1080/00672708309511316

Cited by 34 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Unlike other kingdoms of the Great Lakes region of Africa (Celis, 1987;Sassoon, 1982), iron was not a central component of the iconography of the state of Buganda, perhaps because it was mainly the preserve of outsiders. When at the beginning of the 20th century Buganda was swamped by imported European iron and by missionary values, which disparaged iron production because of its ties with precolonial religion, iron smelting was rapidly forgotten.…”

Section: Smelting In Bugandamentioning

confidence: 90%

Variability in single smelting episodes – a pilot study using iron slag from Uganda

Humphris

Martinón‐Torres

Rehren

et al. 2009

Journal of Archaeological Science

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Section: Smelting In Bugandamentioning

confidence: 90%

Variability in single smelting episodes – a pilot study using iron slag from Uganda

Humphris

Martinón‐Torres

Rehren

et al. 2009

Journal of Archaeological Science

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“…. Some, such as Karagwe (Sassoon 1983;Reid and MacLean 1995), Buhaya (Schmidt 1997), Nkore (Karugire 1971;Sassoon 1983) and Rwanda (Sassoon 1983), as well as another nearby Bantu polity, the Luba (de Maret 1985(de Maret , 1999, have rituals, regalia and iconography that link iron, king and sometimes cattle, in the form of, for example, royal hammers and spears that were stylistically imbued with cattle horns. the coexistence and blossoming of all' (Chrétien 2003: 144).…”

Section: Kingdoms In Western Uganda (C Ad 1600 To 1860)mentioning

confidence: 99%

The development of iron technology in precolonial western Uganda

Iles

2013

Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa

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The local production of iron was an important technology in eastern Africa up until the earlier twentieth century, when the use and reuse of imported iron overtook vernacular smelting industries and cemented their decline. Prior to this, the utilisation of local ores had produced iron for agricultural implements, household tools and weapons, serving the needs of many generations of farmers and herders across the region. The smelters of western Uganda enjoyed a particularly esteemed reputation in recent history, especially among their neighbours in Buganda. Prior to archaeometallurgical research undertaken in 2007, little was known about the technologies upon which this reputation was fostered. This paper presents an overview of the results of six months of fieldwork in Uganda and subsequent archaeometallurgical analysis, which together revealed the complexities of smelting in Mwenge, western Uganda, between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries. Technological reconstructions indicate that some iron producers in the region were supplementing the iron ores in their smelts with an additional manganese-rich material, imparting a tangible effect on the process and outcomes of these smelting episodes, hypothetically increasing the metal yield and improving operating parameters. Although such harnessing of beneficial manganese-rich minerals was an unexpected and unusual finding, it correlates with existing ethnoarchaeological and ethnohistorical data. Through these avenues, and building upon social approaches to iron technologies, it has been possible to explore this variation in the technological record of western Uganda in the context of the known history of the region.

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“…The difficulty of associating archaeological remains with smelting and smithing groups of the more recent past was identified early on as a significant challenge (Siiriaïnen 1971), and one that has yet to be satisfactorily addressed even today (Iles and Lane 2015). However, the availability of ethnohistoric and ethnographic data initiated more involved discussions of the symbolism of metallurgical activity -also frequently mentioned in these early Azania articles, and epitomised by Sassoon's synopsis of the symbolism of iron objects in the Great Lakes (Sassoon 1983).…”

Section: Metallurgical Research In Azania: the First 25 Years 1966-1990mentioning

confidence: 99%

Making metals in East Africa and beyond: archaeometallurgy inAzania, 1966–2015

Iles

Lyaya

2015

Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa

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Over the course of the last 50 years, the field of archaeometallurgy has grown dramatically, becoming firmly established within the realm of archaeological science.The archaeology and ethnography of African metallurgy has made a major contribution to this field, providing valuable information on the impressive range of raw materials and techniques that past metal producers and metalworkers used, as well as providing important insights into the socio-cultural settings that these technologies operated within. This paper summarises the role that Azania played in communicating some of this research, and charts the development of African archaeometallurgy through Azania's pages. KeywordsMetal production, metalworking, iron, copper, Sub-Saharan Africa Metallurgy in eastern Africa: a brief summaryMetals served a variety of roles within African societies, ranging from the functional and the decorative, to the symbolic and the communicative. The process of winning metal from an ore is a difficult procedure, reliant on the procurement of high-quality ores, ceramics and fuels, and the application of complex technical knowledge. It is a resource-hungry and time-hungry technology, which runs a high risk of failure, but when it succeeds it almost miraculously transforms stone into a substance with a new set of material properties. Perhaps for these reasons, rituals and symbolism often accompanied the activities surrounding metal production and metalworking, manifest in the items used to create or manipulate metal (furnaces, medicines, bellows, tuyères and tools) or the songs, movements and behaviours associated with the processes themselves. By studying the objects and the processes used to make them, the broader

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Kings, Cattle and Blacksmiths: Royal Insignia and Religious Symbolism in the Interlacustrine States

Cited by 34 publications

References 3 publications

Variability in single smelting episodes – a pilot study using iron slag from Uganda

Variability in single smelting episodes – a pilot study using iron slag from Uganda

The development of iron technology in precolonial western Uganda

Making metals in East Africa and beyond: archaeometallurgy inAzania, 1966–2015

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