African iron followup

Fischer's book African Founders referenced an article that supposedly claimed that some African iron production was superior to that in Europe at the time. That seemed a rather dramatic claim, so I checked Journal of African Archaeology, 2004, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2004), pp. 97-112: "What do we know about African iron working?"

Killick doesn't actually find anything that was better. The closest statement is:

In fact, as Schmidt notes, students of African metallurgy have documented an amazing variety of processes, many with no known counterparts on other continents - "a spectrum of variation of such diversity as to suggest that the term "bloomery" no longer does justice" to the range of evidence (p. 220). ... Schmidt goes on to argue that continuous innovation was the normal state in African iron smelting, with each iron worker improvising off a preexisting repertoire of techniques - much, I suppose, like a jazz musician improvising off a standard melody. I'm not sure that I agree with this latter point; iron working can succeed only within a very narrow window of temperature and gas composition, which tends to impose rather strict limits upon individual departures from a successful process.

I think Fischer misread the article. Killick takes the time to point out the flaws in claims that iron smelting was invented in Africa.

One of the books Killick reviewed was "Les Routes du Fer en Afrique," initially proposed by UNESCO with a plan for a number of activities which in the event turned out to result mostly in scholarly journal articles. Surprise, surprise. One of the activities startled me: "consider whether indigenous African techniques of iron production could be revived in remote rural areas as a cost-effective alternative to importing iron from outside the continent."

The answer is obviously no--small scale works aren't going to be efficient (see Mao's Great Leap Forward) and scrap metal is readily available to even remote iron workers.