WEST AFRICAN METALS AND THE ANCIENT MEDITERRANEAN

Abstract

Summary. Contact between the Mediterranean in Roman or earlier times and the Sahara and lands beyond has commonly been examined from the northern angle with rather negative results (as for instance in Mortimer Wheeler's Rome Beyond the Imperial Frontiers, 1954). Although West African archaeology is still at an infant stage, it is now becoming possible to examine the issue from a southern, inner African, angle. (The multi‐volume Cambridge History of Africa, 1975‐, and the less consistent UNESCO General History of Africa, 1981‐, document some of the progress made in reconstructing the African side of the story.) And, while substantial trans‐Saharan communications did not develop till late in the first millennium A. D. with camel‐caravans, stimulated especially by the gold of Far‐West Africa, evidence is emerging of earlier exploitation of other metals, perhaps connected with horse (and cart?) transport. At two localities on the southern Saharan edge there was copper mining and smelting around the mid‐first millennium B.C., with likely trade of the product to the Mediterranean. The case for Nigerian tin at the same period—raised by Taylor in the previous volume of this Journal (1, 317–24)—is less clear, but would make sense in this context. That the same period saw the spread of iron technology in these sub‐Saharan regions is doubtless more than coincidence.