page_title: Ferrous metallurgy
section_title: Africa south of the Sahara
hierarchical_section_title: Ferrous metallurgy / Iron smelting and the Iron Age / Africa south of the Sahara
caption_attribution_description: Spread of the "Early Iron Age" in Eastern, Central and Southern Africa, a proxy for the Bantu migrations. Based on K. Shillington, History of Africa (3rd ed. 2005), p. 63. Urewe (Lake Victoria) 250 BCE, Kwale 200 CE, Kisale 300 CE, , Kalundu/Dambwa 100 CE , Kalambo 300 CE, Nkope 300 CE, Gokmere-Ziwa/Bambata 300 CE, presence in South Africa (Kei river) by 400 CE.
context_page_description: Ferrous metallurgy is the metallurgy of iron and alloys. It began far back in prehistory. The earliest surviving iron artifacts, from the 4th millennium BC in Egypt, were made from meteoritic iron-nickel. It is not known when or where the smelting of iron from ores began, but by the end of the 2nd millennium BC iron was being produced from iron ores from at least Greece to India, and more controversially Sub-Saharan Africa. The use of wrought iron was known by the 1st millennium BC, and its spread marked the Iron Age. During the medieval period, means were found in Europe of producing wrought iron from cast iron using finery forges. For all these processes, charcoal was required as fuel.
  By the 4th century BC Wootz steel was being exported from India to ancient China, Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Archaeological evidence of cast iron appears in 5th-century BC China. New methods of producing it by carburizing bars of iron in the cementation process were devised in the 17th century.
context_section_description: Though there is some uncertainty, some archaeologists believe that iron metallurgy was developed independently in sub-Saharan Africa (possibly in West Africa).
  Inhabitants of Termit, in eastern Niger, smelted iron around 1500 BC. 
  In the region of the Aïr Mountains in Niger there are also signs of independent copper smelting between 2500–1500 BC. The process was not in a developed state, indicating smelting was not foreign. It became mature about 1500 BC.
  Archaeological sites containing iron smelting furnaces and slag have also been excavated at sites in the Nsukka region of southeast Nigeria in what is now Igboland: dating to 2000 BC at the site of Lejja (Eze-Uzomaka 2009) and to 750 BC and at the site of Opi (Holl 2009). The site of Gbabiri (in the Central African Republic) has yielded evidence of iron metallurgy, from a reduction furnace and blacksmith workshop; with earliest dates of 896-773 BC and 907-796 BC respectively. Similarly, smelting in bloomery-type furnaces appear in the Nok culture of central Nigeria by about 550 BC and possibly a few centuries earlier.
  There is also evidence that carbon steel was made in Western Tanzania by the ancestors of the Haya people as early as 2,300-2,000 years ago (about 300 BC or soon after) by a complex process of "pre-heating" allowing temperatures inside a furnace to reach 1300 to 1400° C.
  Iron and copper working spread southward through the continent, reaching the Cape around AD 200. The widespread use of iron revolutionized the Bantu-speaking farming communities who adopted it, driving out and absorbing the rock tool using hunter-gatherer societies they encountered as they expanded to farm wider areas of savanna. The technologically superior Bantu-speakers spread across southern Africa and became wealthy and powerful, producing iron for tools and weapons in large, industrial quantities.
  The earliest records of bloomery-type furnaces in East Africa are discoveries of smelted iron and carbon in Nubia that date back between the 7th and 6th centuries BC, particularly in Meroe where there are known to have been ancient bloomeries that produced metal tools for the Nubians and Kushites and produced surplus for their economy.
caption: Iron Age finds in East and Southern Africa, corresponding to the early 1st millennium AD Bantu expansion
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