Estimating the Temporality of Iron Smelting sites in Africa by Coupling Radiocarbon and Archeomagnetism

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Science and African Archaeology: Appreciating the Impact of David Killick" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The life of African iron smelting sites (duration and production rate) is poorly known because of the low number of dates per site and the dependence on radiocarbon. On two fields in Togo (Bandjeli district) and Benin (Aplahoué district), this methodological communication shows that coupling archaeomagnetism and radiocarbon helps to estimate the temporalities of metallurgy. In Togo, the study focused on three sites dated by 14C in the plateau of the last four centuries. To address this imprecision, 18 furnaces were sampled to determine the archeodirection of the geomagnetic field. Archaeomagnetic dating results could be obtained for 14 structures with a 40–100-year precision. They highlight an activity phase from at least 1650 up to the mid-twentieth century and clarify the chronological relationships between two smelting techniques. In Benin, the two studied sites, excavated since 2020, are mainly constituted by slag heaps. For radiocarbon dating and study of the archaeointensity of the geomagnetic field, respectively, dozens of charcoals and tuyeres or fragments of furnace walls were sampled in different stratigraphic layers. Radiocarbon dates reveal a main activity phase in 1280–1400 CE, while archaeomagnetic results suggest a duration more overall this interval than over a few decades.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeological Science and African Archaeology: Appreciating the Impact of David Killick   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36473.0