The development of iron technology in precolonial western Uganda

Abstract

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.

Iron Production in Uganda: Memories of a Near-forgotten Industry

“…By conflating the available evidence from all of the available sources, it is possible to build a picture of iron production in Mwenge over the past thousand years or so (Iles 2013a). Although iron production in western Uganda currently appears to have been undertaken at a relatively small scale in the early second millennium AD, correlating with a thinly dispersed population at that time, by the sixteenth century the iron industries of the Nyoro kingdom were well established and regionally famous.…”

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

“…Azania has seen the inclusion of increasingly scientific approaches to the study of past technologies as time has gone on, especially in the past ten years (e.g. Nixon 2009;MacDonald et al 2009;Giblin et al 2010;Iles 2013;Perkins 2014;Orton 2014), though it is notable that Europeanbased scholars and laboratories have dominated these studies. Some US-based and US-trained scholars who have made major contributions to the study of African metallurgy have never published in Azania.…”

The exploitation of manganese-rich ‘ore’ to smelt iron in Mwenge, western Uganda, from the mid second millennium AD

“…These dates provide a time frame for the operation of the individual furnaces themselves, but cannot be said to be representative of the total operational period of the sites nor directly related to the sampled slag blocks. The full results of the survey and excavation are reported elsewhere (Iles 2009a(Iles , 2011(Iles , 2013.…”

“…van Noten 1979van Noten , 1983van Grunderbeek et al 1983;Schmidt and Childs 1985;Humphris 2010), evidence for early iron production (i.e. pre-1000 AD) in western Uganda is currently lacking, with the earliest iron production presently recorded at around the 14 th century AD (Robertshaw 1997;Iles 2013). Once established in the region, iron production played a prominent role in the later history of western Uganda and the growth of the kingdom of Bunyoro, with iron becoming a cornerstone of industry, regional trade and social power through the second millennium AD.…”