The Bantu expansion changed Africa. Scientists are still tracing how.
But the peoples of the ancient city of Great Zimbabwe—the capital of a thriving kingdom in southern Africa between 1000 to 1700 AD—were masters.
Key points
- At Mashava, a village 25 miles northwest, fragments bear fingermarks of those who long ago smoothed the structures’ clay interiors.
- This would have made it significantly easier to produce the iron, which was fashioned into hoes, axes, and arrowheads.
- At sites near the city’s stone ruins, clusters of iron-smelting furnaces survive today as mounds of rubble.
Unlike other furnaces that required workers to force air into them with bellows, these were designed to suck air in, then out through a chimney, no human labor required.
Some of the furnaces were nearly an adult’s arm span in width, with walls thick and strong to contain the heat of more than 2,100° Fahrenheit needed to smelt iron.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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