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.
In contemporary Western and capitalist societies, efficiency is commonly defined through concepts such as yield, cost-effectiveness, and economic optimisation. Applying these modern metrics directly to past technologies, however, risks oversimplifying and misinterpreting the complexity of ancient smelting systems, particularly in non-Western contexts such as precolonial Africa, where iron production was deeply embedded in cultural, symbolic, and sometimes ritual frameworks. This project challenges the limitations of current, economically driven definitions of efficiency and proposes a multidimensional approach that integrates technical, social, and economic dimensions. By rethinking efficiency as a culturally situated concept, the project aims to develop a more appropriate analytical framework for understanding African iron technologies and, more broadly, for studying technological systems beyond the narrow confines of modern economic logic.
The research focuses on the Bassar region of northern Togo, an area with one of the longest and most intensively developed ironworking traditions in sub-Saharan Africa, spanning more than 2,500 years. Within this region, the Bandjeli sector presents an exceptional case: two distinct iron-smelting traditions coexisted within the same villages and over the same time periods. This situation offers a rare opportunity to examine how different technological systems operated in parallel, how they mobilised resources, and how they were embedded in the social fabric of local communities.
To address these questions, the project combines multi-element chemical analyses and detailed mineralogical characterisation of ores and slags with archaeological excavation data, archival documentation, and experimental archaeology. This integrated approach seeks to evaluate the respective efficiencies of the two coexisting traditions and to understand the technological, environmental, and social factors that shaped their development. Ultimately, the project aims to contribute new methodological tools for archaeometallurgy while offering a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the history of iron production in the Bassar region.
Funder
Swiss National Science Foundation, Postdoc Mobility
