The archaeologists saving Africa’s ironworking heritage | Feature

For more than a decade, Tanzanian archaeologist Edwinus Lyaya has been searching for traces of an African technology – and tradition – that he worries is ‘disappearing without notice’. In his home country and neighbouring Zambia, in the Great Lakes region of eastern Africa, he has often focused his search on the western side of termite mounds. Here, the fat chimneys of iron-smelting furnaces (malungu) once stood up to three metres tall, their walls likely moulded from the termite mound clay itself. In Zambia, Lyaya exposed the bases of three or four per mound, their chimneys now…