Abstract
We present absolute geomagnetic intensities from iron smelting furnaces discovered at the metallurgical site of Korsimoro, Burkina Faso. Up to now, archaeologists recognized four different types of furnaces based on different construction methods, which were related to four subsequent time periods. Additionally, radiocarbon ages obtained from charcoal confine the studied furnaces to ages ranging from 700–1700 AD, in good agreement with the archaeologically determined time periods for each type of furnace. Archaeointensity results reveal three main groups of Arai diagrams. The first two groups contain specimens with either linear Arai diagrams, or slightly curved diagrams or two phases of magnetization. The third group encompasses specimens with strong zigzag or curvature in their Arai diagrams. Specimens of the first two groups were accepted after applying selection criteria to guarantee the high quality of the results. Our data compared to palaeosecular variation curves show a similar decreasing trend between 900–1500 AD. However, they reveal larger amplitudes at around 800 AD and 1650 AD than the reference curves and geomagnetic field models. Furthermore, they agree well with archaeomagnetic data from Mali and Senegal around 800 AD and with volcanic data around 1700 AD.
Highlights
Most available archaeomagnetic data come from the Northern Hemisphere and especially from Europe[7]
We present here the first archaeointensity results from 17 iron furnaces from Burkina Faso, excavated at the archaeological site of Korsimoro
We briefly report the rock magnetic and demagnetization results previously obtained by Donadini et al.[15]
Summary
Most available archaeomagnetic data come from the Northern Hemisphere and especially from Europe[7]. The acquisition of new data from regions that, up to now, are still poorly covered, will greatly improve the quality of PSV curves and GFMs, will give insight into local features of the geomagnetic field, will improve the geographic distribution of the global compilation of dipolar moments, and will remove eventual biases caused by the uneven geographical distribution of the reference data One of these poorly covered regions is Africa, from where only 46 intensity data for the last 2000 years are reported in the most updated Geomagia50.v3 database, which is one of the largest archaeomagnetic databases[7] (July 2016). Kovacheva[8] investigated samples from Morocco covering the first half millennium
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