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Books > Professional & Technical > Industrial chemistry & manufacturing technologies > Metals technology / metallurgy
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Metals in Past Societies - A Global Perspective on Indigenous African Metallurgy (Paperback, 2015 ed.)
Loot Price: R2,255
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Metals in Past Societies - A Global Perspective on Indigenous African Metallurgy (Paperback, 2015 ed.)
Series: Contributions from Africa
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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This book seeks to communicate to both a global and local audience,
the key attributes of pre-industrial African metallurgy such as
technological variation across space and time, methods of mining
and extractive metallurgy and the fabrication of metal objects.
These processes were transformative in a physical and metaphoric
sense, which made them total social facts. Because the production
and use of metals was an accretion of various categories of
practice, a chaine operatoire conceptual and theoretical framework
that simultaneously considers the embedded technological and
anthropological factors was used. The book focuses on Africa's
different regions as roughly defined by cultural geography. On the
one hand there is North Africa, Egypt, the Egyptian Sudan, and the
Horn of Africa which share cultural inheritances with the Middle
East and on the other is Africa south of the Sahara and the Sudan
which despite interacting with the former is remarkably different
in terms of technological practice. For example, not only is the
timing of metallurgy different but so is the infrastructure for
working metals and the associated symbolic and sociological
factors. The cultural valuation of metals and the social positions
of metal workers were different too although there is evidence of
some values transfer and multi-directional technological cross
borrowing. The multitude of permutations associated with metals
production and use amply demonstrates that metals participated in
the production and reproduction of society. Despite huge temporal
and spatial differences there are so many common factors between
African metallurgy and that of other regions of the world. For
example, the role of magic and ritual in metal working is almost
universal be it in Bolivia, Nepal, Malawi, Timna, Togo or Zimbabwe.
Similarly, techniques of mining were constrained by the underlying
geology but this should not in any way suggest that Africa's
metallurgy was derivative or that the continent had no initiative.
Rather it demonstrates that when confronted with similar
challenges, humanity in different regions of the world responded to
identical challenges in predictable ways mediated as mediated by
the prevailing cultural context. The success of the use of
historical and ethnographic data in understanding variation and
improvisation in African metallurgical practices flags the
potential utility of these sources in Asia, Latin America and
Europe. Some nuance is however needed because it is simply naive to
assume that everything depicted in the history or ethnography has a
parallel in the past and vice versa. Rather, the confluence of
archaeology, history and ethnography becomes a pedestal for
dialogue between different sources, subjects and ideas that is
important for broadening our knowledge of global categories of
metallurgical practice.
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