932 Book Reviews—Labor and Technology TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE welcomed the promise of economic development and did not seek out conflict and controversy; state and federal officials nominally re sponsible for oversight did little; and the local press largely ignored any rumors of disease that were circulated. So by the time the news of this disaster finally began to spread, largely owing to leftist pub lications, the harm had already been done. In the 1930s, nobody could even say, with any certainty, just who or how many had died. That left Cherniack, a professor in Yale’s Occupational Medicine Program, with a difficult piece of historical detection. He could not simply count the victims one by one, by ex amining death records. Instead, he had to arrive at his figure of over 700 deaths by performing a complex epidemiological analysis of ex cess deaths in the local county during and after the tunnel-driving years. By extrapolating from this, he determined how many migrant workers (who spent at least two months in the tunnel) would have died from acute silicosis, or related lung diseases, within five years of leaving Hawk’s Nest. Relatively little of The Hawk’s Nest Incident is given over to the actual technology employed in driving the tunnel. The focus is clearly on its social costs and on the failure of institutions and individuals to safeguard human life. For historians interested in corporate values and ethics, in government regulation and public policy, and in oc cupational health and safety, this is a very well done—and disturbing— book. Larry Lankton Dr. Lankton is an associate professor of science, technology, and society at Michigan Technological University. Of late he has been researching the history of underground safety in the Michigan copper mines. The Blooms ofBanjeli: Technology and Gender in West African Ironmaking. Videocassette by Carlyn Saltman, with Candice Goucher and Eu genia Herbert. Somerville, Mass.: Saltman Productions, 1986. Color/ 28 minutes: VHS or W' cassette (PAL, SECAM, and NTSC avail able). Resource Guide: 1987; pp. 20; bibliography (paper). $275.00 purchase; $45.00 rental; + charge for extra Resource Guides. Avail able from Documentary Educational Resources, 101 Morse Street, Watertown, Massachusetts 02172. The last ten years have seen a remarkable resurgence of interest in indigenous African metallurgy. Two major volumes of regional stud ies appeared recently (N. Echard, ed., Métallurgi.es africaines [Paris: Société des Africanistes, 1983]; and R. Haaland and P. Shinnie, eds., African Iron-Working: Ancient and Traditional [Oslo: Norwegian Uni versities Press, 1985]), and there has been a sharp increase in the TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews—Labor and Technology 933 amount of periodical literature on the subject. This revival is in part a reaction to the imminent extinction of indigenous African metal lurgy in general and of bloomery iron smelting in particular. African ironworkers are the last practitioners of this group of technologies, which have been in continuous use in the Old World for more than three millennia. In most regions of Africa, bloomery iron smelting fell into disuse between twenty and sixty years ago, and the pool of informants shrinks with each passing year. The most urgent task is simply to record some of these techniques in th hr social context, which is best done by sponsoring a reconstruction of the entire process. Studies of African ironworking have also been given new impetus by the synergism of interdisciplinary research. Recent work has blended (in varying measure) contributions from archaeology, economic his tory, art history, materials science, social anthropology, and historical linguistics. The best of these new studies combine detailed technical description and analysis of the bloomery smelting process with an thropological investigation of how the smelters themselves view the process, and of how the social organization of production was struc tured by these beliefs. The complex structures of belief around African iron smelting are particularly well explored in two films. The earlier of the two is Nicole Echard’s Noces de Fer (Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientihque , 1965), which is a superb (and visually stunning) study of Hausa ironworkers in Niger. This him has not received the attention it de serves, and there is, to the best of my...