Africa

Humans have used stone tools to cut, pierce, and scrape materials for more than 3 million years. Understanding how these ancient technologies were designed and used is a major research theme for Stone Age archaeologists. This research focus is shared by mechanical engineers, who possess over a century of expertise in how metal knives, axes, and blades cut the very same plant and animal tissues processed by early human groups.

Colonial and post-colonial ethnographic records across West Africa reveal a remarkable diversity in furnace morphology, iron production scales, and the technical organisation of smelting practices. This variability reflects the rich cultural, technological, and economic contexts that shaped iron production across the region. Yet, the factors driving this heterogeneity remain poorly understood, and archaeometallurgy still lacks a robust and widely applicable methodology for comparing multiple ironmaking techniques.