J Archaeol Method Theory (2009) 16:262282

DOI 10.1007/s10816-009-9065-0

Tropes, Materiality, and Ritual Embodiment of African

Iron Smelting Furnaces as Human Figures
Peter R. Schmidt

Published online: 16 June 2009

# Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2009

Abstract The largest baked clay figure in Africa is an iron smelting furnace. Clay
breasts, vaginal openings, testicle-like bellows, and penis-like blow pipes are part of
a culturally constructed reproductive system using the female body and parts of the
male anatomy. Ritual embodiments using potent tropes, body gestures, and sounds
transform furnaces into human bodies. Anthropological representations have long
examined only female fecundity and misrepresented reproductive processes such as
menses. Thick description of ritual expressions, however, sheds new light on
previously dichotomous categories of male and female in iron smelting and creates a
more complete understanding of the materiality of the female body in baked clay
furnaces.
Keywords Tropes . Ritual embodiment . Iron smelting . Ethnoarchaeology . Africa
African iron smelting furnaces, many of which are socially constructed as human
female bodies, offer insights into the rendering of human forms into claymuch
like figurines of lesser scale. Iron smelting furnaces though constructed of baked
clay (and sometimes stone) are often documented in the archaeological record as
fragmentaryafter having been left to erode in the open air, partly pulled down
after a smelt, or truncated by subsequent cultivation. In a fragmentary state, they
provide remote clues for their original form, much like the figurines of atalhyk
(Meskell et al. 2008) or other locales where materializations of the human form
may have undergone various forms of destruction. The figuration of African iron

P. R. Schmidt
Department of Anthropology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA
P. R. Schmidt (*)
20924 NE 132nd Ave, Waldo, FL 32694, USA
e-mail: schmidtp@ufl.edu

Embodiment of African Iron Smelting Furnaces as Human Figures

263

smelting furnaces is of significant interest because their exterior forms,

sometimes sculpted into the shape of a woman, are but part of a more profound
figuration that reaches deep within the furnace.
In such cases, the outward female attributes of the furnace infuse meaning
onto and into the oversized clay figure while this is amplified and complemented by performance of ritual embodiments that link the bodies and sensory
experiences of iron smelters with the reproductive furnaces, rendering the
smelters as sexual mates and midwives (Schmidt 1996, 1997). My perspective
here draws on the transformative properties of tropes through the agency of
subjectsiron smelterswho also through application of techniques of
medicinal curing, magical protections, and ancestral appeasement render
themselves as protectors and curative agents vis--vis the iron smelting furnace.
Warnier (2001) and Rowlands (2005) help to disclose the praxis engaged in such
ritual processes in which relations between different categories of persons in the
Grassfields of Cameroon are conceived metonymically through the bodily
processes by which they are distributed, that is, digestion, regurgitation,
breathing, spitting, and ejaculation (Rowlands 2005:78), illustrated by the Fons
(king) spitting raphia winetropically constructed as an ancestral substance
over the backs of his subjects and particularly women who desire to ensure
conception. Though the Grassfields rituals pertain to different categories of
persons, the same principles apply to persons and smelting furnaces, transformed
through multiple rituals into persons, thus collapsing the subject/object
dichotomies that often prevail when we gaze upon the materiality of smelting
furnaces.
The importance of the iron smelting furnace as artifactusually viewed as a
technological artifact rather than one that is figurativelies in its materialization as person. We cannot examine the insides of baked clay figurines to gain
clues into what their materiality means in terms of everyday life, yet we can
examine the external and internal materiality of furnaces to find new ways of
seeing how their figuration as persons unfolded, to understand the processes by
which their materiality as persons came to pass. First, they are open containers,
readily receiving medicinal tropes (figures of speech applied to medicines) that
signify the bodily fluids of both female and male social agentstransformations
that occur through ritual performance. The clay figure is technologically viable
only if it serves the higher purpose of human reproduction. It is not so much
sculpting a female form to meet normative ideals of a reproductive woman as it
is the ritual treatment of the insides of furnaces that [recon]figure the exterior
without any outward change in appearance.
Many iron smelting furnaces in Africa are indeed sculpted and then fired
into various forms that resemble a human female, and herein lies the
connection that throws light upon how smelting furnaces can be considered
within the same category as figurinesthey are carefully sculpted, much as
figurines, to fit the image of a human femalereplete with breasts, vaginas,
legs spread for birth passage, and other inscriptions and decorative attachments
as well as multiple inclusionsmany of which can be read archaeologically
that attest to their female reproductive properties. Here, I will draw on a variety
of case studies based on archaeological documentation (Shona, Fipa), ethno-

264

Schmidt

Fig. 1 The location of iron smelting groups in Africa mentioned in this discussion. Higher case type
marks the Barongo, and Fipa, while lower case type marks others such as the Haya, Pangwa, Chokwe, and
Chewa. The Shona are located to the south in Zimbabwe.

archaeology (Barongo, Fipa), and ethnohistory (Shona, Fipa, Barongo) to tease

out these themes (Fig. 1).1
African iron smelting furnaces sculpted with female characteristics are not
stand-alone phenomena that signify just the reproductive qualities of females.
Rather, they fit into a larger tropic ritual field in which males play key roles as
creators of the female images as sexual partners and impregnators and also play
liminal roles as mid-wives. These multiple roles are complemented by an array
1

The Shona iron smelting furnaces, located in todays Zimbabwe, are known mostly from ethnohistoric
accounts that reference their gendered external details but lack significant information about ritual process.
The Shona are the dominant ethnic group in Zimbabwe. They have not regularly smelted iron since the
first half of the last century, except for special demonstrations. The much studied Fipa furnaces lack
external representations of gender, but have rich details about internal ritual transformations that embody
the furnace. They are unique for being the largest natural draft furnaces on the continent. The Barongo
furnaces also lack outward signs of their transformations into female vessels and differ from the others in
being constructed of slabs of termite earth and broken tuyeres. Drawing their membership from the Basubi
and Bazinza, among other ethnic groups, the Barongo actively practiced their craft during the nineteenth
century and early twentieth century. They experienced a short-term revitalization during World War II and
immediately after, when local iron products replaced UK exports. All groups are Bantu speakers and
agriculturalists.

Embodiment of African Iron Smelting Furnaces as Human Figures

265

of items used to operate the furnaces including bellows that signify testicles and
blow pipes (tuyeres) that may represent phalluses, or in some instances, vaginal
openings. The tropes attached to iron smelting furnaces are multilayered and
complicated, yet their exegesis has much to tell us about how meaning is
conferred through rituals of embodiment, insights that make diaphanous how
figurines in the diminutive sense may also have been embodied, especially
through ritual processes that pertain to healing, protection from angry ancestors,
and apotropaic devices used against evil perpetrated against the furnace (not the
smelters) through sorcery and witchcraft.
The literature on embodiment depends deeply on the assertion that ritual
performance transforms the material representation into the living human form.
Ideas of ritual embodiment interpenetrated Halbwachs (1992 [1941, 1952])
discourse on Christian ritual, particularly when he emphasized gestures and liturgy
that re-enact the sufferings of Christ. This was amplified later by Connerton (1989),
who elaborated the intimate linkages among ritual, sounds, gesture, and the
embodied experience, themes also taken up by French thinkers such as LeroiGourhan (1943 [1971], 1945 [1973], 1993) and Pierre Lemonnier (1986, 1992).
Earlier anthropological literature on ritual embodiment and performance (e.g.,
Tambiah 1979) did not specifically address materiality, but this issue has been taken
up more recently (e.g., Rowlands 2005, 2009; Keane 2005), following the notable
and early contribution of Turners (1991, 1995) exegesis on Kayapo costumes. The
sparse treatment of materiality and embodiment has partially been corrected by
contemporary archaeologists, starting with Susan Kus (1979) path-breaking
examination of phenomenology and more recently by others (e.g., Hamilakis et al.
2002; Joyce 2005; Meskell 1998; Meskell and Joyce 2003; Montserrat 1998).
Arguments for embodiment through ritual are usually invoked in archaeology using
inference about ritual derived from context and associated finds as well as texts
(Meskell 2001; Meskell and Joyce 2003). No matter how persuasive the contextual
information buttressing an argument for ritual performance in which materiality is
given external and internal human form and meaning, the archaeological record is
nonetheless fragmentary. A fragmentary and truncated record elicits the use of
historical texts or analogy drawing from living cultures to infer the significance and
meaning of objects. As we have come to learn in African archaeology, such analogy
itself may be based on a fragmentary ethnographic record in which ritual processes
are more suggestive than they are substantive (Andah 1995; Lane 2005; Stahl 1993).
I seek to escape this conundrum by examining ritual processes of embodiment in
living African cultureswith detailed observations of ritual sequences and meanings
linked to the material figuration of human females on and inside iron smelting
furnaces. The purpose of these different rituals is to transform the furnace into a
fecund woman, a secure woman confident in her ancestral relations, and a woman
free from fear, in other words an extrasocial body transformed from an inert object
into an agent endowed with human powers. This reverses processes of transformation in which ordinary social agents cover themselves with costumes of animals or
birds, transforming the embodied subject from ordinary social actor to mythical
beingsas seen in Turners (1995) treatment of the Kayapo in Brazil. This process,
in which the object is agent, as an interlocutor between person, things, and worlds,
undermines the fixity of our imposed boundaries, and thus materiality is crafting

266

Schmidt

things from nothing, subjects from nonsubjects (Meskell 2005:51), and, I would
add, through the enacting of tropes (Tilley 1999).
The examples that follow provide a rich understanding of how ritual practices
transform iron smelting furnaces, both externally and internally, into fecund brides
being wooed and lovingly entangled with male smelters and their amplified,
hyperbolized male tools. These two domainsthe external furnace and the
internal furnaceare inseparable, for a surface consideration of external features
alone cannot capture the full extent of transformative embodiment and indeed would
be a superficial treatment (Miller 2005). Moreover, the relationship between
external features and internal characteristics is bound up in powerful tropes based on
synecdochewherein the container comes to represent the contained (e.g., where
the external parts of the furnace come to represent the processes inside) and vice
versa. The latter case prevails when iron smelting furnaces lack external human
characteristics but simultaneously have internal functions that are ritually constructed using the materiality of medicinal healingas female reproductive
attributesor, where the part comes to represent the whole, another instance of
synecdoche (which also occurs when the whole represents a part, a form of
metonymy) at work.2
Here I will look at tropesmetaphors and metonyms3under conditions of
highly focused social agency during ritual to understand embodiment. Kirmayer
(1993) and Van Wolputte (2004) argue that tropes belong to the domain of praxis
(not cognition) because they suggest instead of conceive, elicit instead of define, or
provoke instead of prescribe. At the same time, they are rooted in bodily (sensuous)
experience (Van Wolputte 2004:257), a view shared by Warnier (2001) and
Rowlands (2005). Importantly for our treatment, tropes address both social and
bodily experiences (Jackson 1983)a kind of efficacy that brings together the two
domains, imposing them upon inert material (clay, slag, iron, medicines, parts of the
furnace), creating conditions of contiguity and association to transform them into
social and embodied experience. Meanings arising out of tropes are not just
representational but are also embodied, for example, when the metonym for menses
a red bleeding piece of barkis placed in the inner most reaches of a furnace;
or, when potent medicines to appease the ancestors are place contiguously to the
bleeding bark. Such social agency parallels practices, for example, among
the Himba of Namibia when ancestors are embodied (ingested) by particular
diets associated with them or when their names are uttered (sound and speech
motions) daily (Van Wolputte 2004). Other examples may be referenced from the
Grassfields of Cameroon, where the principal ancestral substances are saliva,
raphia wine, breath, seamen, food, and palm oil; some of these are contained
Synecdoche may be illustrated by example: Captain Hawkins marshaled ten sail for his battle against
the Portuguese off the Banda Islands, a part (sail) for the whole (ship); or, I am tired of fighting City
Hall, a whole (City Hall) for the part (bureaucrats). The latter also illustrates the principle of container for
contained.
3
Metonymy may also be illustrated by example, in this case drawing on the principle of contiguity that
leads to substitution: A waitress, hustling to serve people, yells out an order to the short-order cook, One
bacon burger for the beard. The beard, contiguous to a male face, comes to represent a male patron. The
same principle applies when objects/people from unrelated domains are juxtaposed and take on an
integrative identitythe sexy blond draped over the hood of a red Porche, thus a sexy car.
2

Embodiment of African Iron Smelting Furnaces as Human Figures

267

physically in the body, others in bags, bowls, and calabashes that are considered as
extensions of that physicality (Rowlands 2005:78).
I first consider some of the better known external figurations of iron smelting
furnacesthe application of breasts, of vaginal openings, and of specialized
markings such as female scarifications that carry specific cultural meanings,
depending on the cultural setting. These are typically the treatments that are better
known in the African literature (Childs 1991; Childs and Killick 1993; Cline 1937;
Herbert 1993; Schmidt 1997), but that mostly focus on the external, not the internal
ritual treatments that lead to the deeper transformations occurring when this baked
clay figure and vessel is administered to as a female in need of various cultural
interventions.
A key issue is how to decode the cultural meanings that are infused onto the
surface and the insides of iron smelting furnaces. Meanings unfold in a complex
play of tropes before, during, and after smelting activity. Since the female
reproductive cycle is so central to this male-centric technology, an understanding
of beliefs about the female body in African cultures is critical, especially beliefs
about pollution, menstruation, pregnancy, and abortion. In African iron smelting,
the female body becomes technological process and vice versa, a metonymic
transformation of the human body into technological process and economic
prosperity. Economy and reproduction become inseparable as do healing and
prosperity. If we consider these as interrelated phenomena belonging to the same
conceptual field, then an understanding of the play of tropes in African iron
technology opens more readily.
My treatment will examine the performance of technological ritual, on first
appearance a rather bounded domain compared to political and sacred domains that
we conventionally associate with ritual embodiment. While the social construction
of the iron smelting furnace as a woman impregnated by male smelters obviously
appears to be singularly technological, a deeper scrutiny shows that the different
ritual processes are drawn extensively from the medicinal world, from apotropaic
magic (protective treatments to ward off evil, e.g., those practicing sorcery or black
magic), from rituals that appease ancestors, and from sympathetic magic to ensure
functional success. All of these domains have their special interests in the welfare of
the fecund bride, interests that hold in common the reproduction of society without
reproductive failures and conflicts.

Iron Smelting and Surface Embodiments

Though much is known about the treatment of iron smelting furnaces by appending
breasts and other female characteristics, surprisingly little of this knowledge is
accompanied by detailed ritual knowledge. Usually substituting for direct ritual
knowledge are the testimonies of former iron smelters, who often render their
experiences to anthropologists in a highly idealized manner. This circumstance
pertains to the Shona iron smelting furnaces in Zimbabwe, where the sculpted
furnaces render the female body in such exquisite detail (Bent 1893; Childs and
Dewey 1996; Robinson 1961), down to very specific cultural attributes such as the
scarifications that young women are given upon reaching their sexual maturity and

268

Schmidt

representations of a womans waist belt, called a mutimwi (Dewey 1990; Childs and
Dewey 1996).
The first observations of Shona furnaces come from Theodore Bent (1893)
(Fig. 2) who at the end of the nineteenth century observed that the Shona furnace is
another instance of the design being taken from the human form, for it is made to
represent a seated woman, the head is the chimney, decorated in some cases with
eyes, nose and mouth, resting on shoulders, the legs are stretched out and form the
sides of the furnace, and to complete the picture they decorate the front with breasts
and the tattoo decorations usually found on female stomachs (Bent 1893:46)
(Fig. 2). While Bents description provides a surface outline, we learn little of how
embodied ritual agents conferred the gender attributes associated with the furnaces.
The question assumes an even greater importance when we come to realize that male
performers must undergo their own embodied transformation while engaging
material furnaces that they aim to change into a living female. The contexts in
which these renderings occurred are missing, and we are left with most accounts
claiming that skin modification are in fact scarifications that signify a young
womans advancement to sexual potency (Childs 1991; Robinson 1961).
An examination of the Shona furnaces provides several insights into transformative processes that were likely tied to processes of ritual embodiment since they
signify the passage of young women to fecund, mature women. The first is the
scarification that appears on the front torso of the furnace, a form of female skin
decoration linked to other domains such as granaries and cooking potsobjects
identified with agricultural production and reproduction of society. Such scarifications among young women in the past, called nyora, have been linked to the
womans patrilineage and her relationship to her most important ancestors (Dewey
1993). What we know of reconstructed and historical Shona furnaces points to
inscribed marks as being linear, grid-like, and grooved applications (Fig. 3). What
seems most important in the Shona evidence is that scarification may mark both a
sexually receptive woman and a woman who belongs to the ancestors, namely, the
ancestors of the smeltersa possible ownership claim inscribed on the skin of the

Fig. 2 Drawing by Theodore Bent of various objects inscribed with female scarification marks, including
an iron furnace, granary, and drum. From Bent (1893: 308, 46, 70).

Embodiment of African Iron Smelting Furnaces as Human Figures

269

Fig. 3 Shona furnaces in the middle of the twentieth centuryafter iron smelting had diminished as an
economic activity among the Shona; the furnace on the right is in operation and has clearer marks of
scarification. The vaginal opening in the front is the passage way for the extraction of the iron blooms.
Photograph compliments of the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies,
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

furnace. Others, starting with Bent (1893:107), find that some Shona furnaces carry
vertical grooves just above the rake-hole; these have later come to be interpreted as
signifying female genitalia (Robinson 1961), but the thin Shona ethnography of
ritual in this setting does not sustain this meaninga strong commentary on the
shakiness of interpretative treatments when reliable ethnography is lacking.
Without ritual performance, the meanings of such inscriptions may never be
resolved, and these lacunae point to a real need to develop thick descriptions of ritual
processes associated with such embodiments. The use of waist belts made of beads
on Shona furnaceslimited to several non-performative contextsis more
accessible in terms of their social meanings. The representation of a womans waist
beltthe mutimwion a furnace allows us to understanding how materialized
tropes transform identity. In this instance, it is highly likely that the dressing of the
furnace in a waist belt of beads would have occurred during a ritual that replicated a
young womans movement to first menstruation, marriage, and childbirth (Dewey
1990; Childs and Dewey 1996). The waist belt on the furnace brings together two
completely separate domains of material culture into a relationship of contiguity and
hence integrative identity (Ricoeur 1977)one of the defining characteristics of
metonymy.4 Integrative identity results in the furnace taking on the power, values,
and biological attributes of a young woman wearing a mutimwi: these belts also have
potent erotic connotations, and are commonly used to strengthen her sexual power
andsafeguard her fertility (Aquina 1968; Childs and Dewey 1996). We gain
additional insights with the documentation of waist belt use on Shona furnaces at
Ziwa farm in Zimbabwe (Bernhard 1963). On the better preserved of two examples,
the front rim of a smelting furnace was decorated by a figurine depicting a woman
4

By using contiguity of unrelated elements to create an associative identity, metonymy differs from
metaphor in its more profound transformative use of substitution.

270

Schmidt

giving birth (Fig. 4). Notably, inscribed on the figurine was a mutimwi (also called
mukonde), a string of red, white, and black beadsstill worn by womenwhile
giving birth to a child (Bernard 1963:23536; cf. Herbert 1993). The structuring of
these materializations by placing a birthing female figurine with such easily
identified and potent accoutrements immediately above the vaginal opening of the
furnace unveils layered tropes that amplify the embodiment of the furnace: the
application of waist beads (a metonymy for fertility) to a female figurine giving
birth; the attachment of the figurine immediately above the birth channel of the
furnace (another metonymy arising from the contiguity of the furnace and the
figurine); and the application of what have already been noted as possible female
ritual scarifications (another metonymy).

Sensory and Internal Embodiments: Healing Rituals

There are now several detailed ethnographic studies of ritual performance in which
social agentsiron smelters and healerstransform the internal characteristics of
iron smelting furnaces among the Barongo of western Tanzania and the Fipa of SW
Tanzania. These two case studies illustrate the potent embodiments that render the
insides of smelting furnaces into human females with hot sexuality, strong ties to the
ancestors, and powerful needs for protection against sorcerers trying to ruin their
reproductive powers. I will draw on ethnoarchaeological research conducted in
1979, 1980, and 1984 among the Barongoa multiethnic group living southwest of
Lake Victoria in Geita and Biharamulo Districts of Tanzaniato illustrate some of
these tropic treatments. Observations about Fipa iron smelters come from both an
extensive ethnohistoric literature and ethnoarchaeological studies conducted by

Fig. 4 One of two smelting furnaces documented at Ziwa Farm. The figurine giving birth is located at the
top of the furnace mouth. From Bernhard (1963: pl. 2).

Embodiment of African Iron Smelting Furnaces as Human Figures

271

Randi Barndon (1992, 1996, 2001), who in 1992 and 1995 researched the Fipa in
Rukwa Region in SW Tanzania, between Lakes Tanganyika and Rukwa.
Anthropological treatments of internal embodiments of African iron smelting
furnaces have oversimplified if not misrepresented the full array of reproductive
tropes by focusing on female parturition and treating menstruation as only taboo and
a period of sterility. This facile treatment of menses, often emphasizing pollution,
isolation, and avoidance (common to most African cultures), overlooks the
biological reality that without menses there is no female reproductive cycle. The
uncritical acceptance of normative menses taboos and their reification in African
anthropology and archaeology arises from a dependency on oral testimonies given
outside smelting activity and from an absence of prolonged ethnography of the full
panoply of beliefs and ritual practices that unfold over multiple smelting activities.
Interest in the internal body, especially the incorporation of drugs and food into
the body, has been a topical focus for other archaeologists (Boyd 2002; Hamilakis
1999, 2002; Wilkie 2000). The ingestion of specialized drugs during ritual processes
immediately refocuses our attention on iron smelting rituals, where the application of
potent drugs to the inside of furnaces and furnace tools placed inside the furnace
help us to unlock deeper knowledge about internal embodiments effected by the
ritual healers/smelters. This following exegesis of ritual transformations among the
Barongo and Fipa iron smelters sheds new light on what previously appeared to be
simply technological ritual, a category that privileges ritual as a mnemonic
sequencing of technical steps and thus obscures a deep well spring of healing
knowledge applied to human frailties. Once we accept the application of medicinal
solutions as embodiment, then a more nuanced understanding of the materiality of
the female body and its reproductive characteristics in iron technology will unfold.

Ritual Performance and Internal Embodiment Among the Barongo and Fipa
I turn now to the Barongo sculpting of iron smelting furnaces as lived experience
and embodiment, arguing that transformations arise out of collective Barongo
agencythe use of their bodies and their experiences in making meaning attached to
the baked clay figures that we call iron smelting furnaces. The bricolage of
Barongo ritual applied to iron smelting is an engaging and informative transformational domain. These iron smelters during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
work groups of multi-ethnic makeupwere constantly involved in meeting
challenges that have to do with mining new clays for tuyeres, obtaining new iron
ore resources, and dealing with unfamiliar wood species for charcoal. As they moved
from locale to locale, either to avoid attacks from marauding slave traders in the
nineteenth century or the sanctions of colonial officials during the twentieth century,
they constantly confronted social and physical adversities. Their responses to new
political, social, and physical conditions can be read in their ritual repertoire, with
extensive borrowings from medicinal cures.
Thus bricolage, the fabrication of new solutions that draw on past experience and
spontaneous innovation, is an important part of the ritual process as it is applied to
technology. Several examples stand out from the first smelt conducted during 1979
after a hiatus of 27 years, a process conducted away from the village and secluded in

272

Schmidt

the bush. The ritual events of that day and later smelts focus our attention on sensory
processes of embodiment (Hamilakis 2002), with an emphasis on sensory
stimulations related to sexual intercourse (Schmidt and Voss 2000) and on the
sexual reproductive cycle of a womancontradicting the normative treatments of
menstruation as polluting (e.g., Green 1999; see Gottlieb 1982 and Gausset 2002 for
more complete treatments of menses). The intense sensory stimulations activated
during sexual intercourseas with eatingare stored into the body, generating
bodily memory, which can be recalled and re-activated by similar experiences
(Hamilakis 2002:124). Such bodily memory is invoked when the iron smelters
initiate the furnace, much like the sexual initiation of a bride.
After the construction of a circular shelter and the excavation of a 40-cm-deep
80-cm-diameter pit within the shelter, the first activity is the placement of key ritual
items in the bottom of the furnace pitthe metonymical womb (nyaruwengi) of the
furnace. A piece of kukuba woodthick with its red sap and a metaphor for
menstrual blood (a local emic explanation) is placed in the nyaruwengi first, a
sequencing that captures the female reproductive cyclethe womb being cleansed
before it is fertile and ready to reproduce (Schmidt 1996). Importantly, the leaves of
the muhingura plant are placed beneath the bleeding kukuba offering. The
muhingura tuber, known for its medicinal properties in curing infertility, is also an
offering, but what captures our attention in this embodiment process is that the
muhingura leaves are saturated by the symbolic menses, uniting mensesthe
restoration of fertilitywith potent devices that restore fertility. These internal
bodily processes, the most intimate domain of female human sexuality, are embodied
in the ritual actions and movements of the two smelting officials as they carefully
add these ingredients to the furnace womb, wetting the protective leaves in a manner
consistent with the biological flow of menses upon a protective apron. It is important
to note, because I have elsewhere highlighted bricolage in the Barongo ritual
process, that these particular rituals did not appear spontaneously in the ritual
repertoire. Rather, they were a part of smelting ritual habitus, but only at the
beginning of long cycles of use.
The next more sensual ritual phase involves the embodiment of the furnace by both
the head smelter and the head ritual authority. Both remove their clothes, sit on the
ground opposite each other across the furnace pitback to back (Schmidt 1996:95),
and in a rhythmic manner using their voices and their bodies, push a circular mound of
earth (earlier excavated from the pit to accommodate the various medicines) into the
pit (Fig. 5). This sexual intercourse with the furnacewith direct genital contactis a
profoundly sensory experience in which the embodied sounds and motions of
intercourse culminate in the impregnation of the furnace, a fecund bride. A metonymic
act of intercoursebecause of the contiguity of human genitalia with the earth of the
furnace pit [semantically separated domains of flesh and earth]the play of tropes in
this embodiment of the furnace goes much deeper. It also signifies, because of the
concurrent display of anuses, a strong contempt for bad and dangerous things,
including ancestors who may be disapproving (Schmidt 1996; Bjerke 1981:197). This
practice directly neutralizes and overwhelms any sorcery possibly aimed at the
furnace. Parallel to the treatment of menses, such a display does not pollute; rather, it
protects and ensures success. These two ritual cycles occur only when a new furnace is
initiated. A furnace pit may be used repeatedly without renewal of the magical and

Embodiment of African Iron Smelting Furnaces as Human Figures

273

Fig. 5 Barongo smelters pushing earth into a furnace pit to seal ritual devices at the bottom. Both their
genitals and anuses are in contact with the soilsimultaneously sexual intercourse with the furnace and
suppression of evil spells and displeased ancestors. The use of a white substance in the form of a cross is
similar to the Bakongo cosmogram. This ritual process occurs after a shelter has been constructed in the
bush; it initiates the first smelting pit, around which the furnace structure will be built.

medicinal devices, even over a year hiatus (e.g., between 1979 and 1980, but not
between 1980 and 1984, when renewal was required though the same area was used).
The following day, the head smelter dug a small trench contiguous to the southern
side of the furnace pit and buried the leaves of the muhingura tuber as well as a
bleeding piece of kakuba treeboth previously buried in the furnace pita process
that amplifies the earlier treatments. After the earth had been returned to the furnace
pit, the head smelter sprinkled two containers of rukago medicine over the new
furnace floor, an apotropaic device to make people fear the place and prevent anyone
from interfering with the ritual devices that were intended to bring a heavy child.
Once the furnace superstructure was in place (hewed blocks of termite earth with
broken tuyeres wedged between the blocks), the smelters inserted their clay tuyere
pipes inside the furnace after rubbing their ends with maputo bark, a reddish
substance said to strengthen the tuyeres. The value of this practice lies in the
medicine stiffening the tuyere, a phallus, so it will withstand the heat and not
droop, a metonymical Viagra for flaccid, drooping blowpipes. It is both an external
application of the ritual cure and an internal one, for the blowpipes are then slipped
inside the hot vaginal-like cavity.
The play of tropes that integrate menses as lived experience and that treat the
menstrual condition of women as unexceptional is amplified during two rites of
passage that initiate the furnace before smelting commences. The first rite of passage
took place just after the fire broke through the top of the charge stacked on top of the
charcoal, when the head smelters wife entered the smelting house with a pot of beer.
Each smelter in turn sipped beer through a straw and then spit it on the ground and,
again, on the furnace; this ritual mimics a widely practiced rite of passage in the

274

Schmidt

Fig. 6 Splashing of sacrificial blood on the flow slags, ritual fertility medicine, furnace, and bellows
before a Barongo smelt. The furnace is built from blocks of termite earth, between which are wedged
horizontal, broken pieces of tuyeres. This is a non-slag tapping furnace that employs a bellows-driven air
blast.

region that ensures fertility when a bride and groom spit beer or milk on one another.
Rowlands (2005) account of the Fon (king) spitting raffia wine on his subjects,
especially women to ensure fertility, comes to mind as a tropic parallel in the
Grassfields of Cameroon. This ritual was repeated 5 years later, quite differently
when a new furnace was initiated: The wife of the head smelter was joined by
another smelter and together they sipped beer from the woven pot and then spit it
upon the furnace, followed by the other senior smelters who also spit beer upon the
furnacemore closely replicating the ritual as it occurs in nuptial settings with a
living female engaged in the embodiment of the fertile condition. This ritual
brings a fecund female (without concern for her menstrual condition, as her
embodiment of this condition may be critical to the process), into intimate
contact with the furnace, a process similar to several other groups such as the
Chokwe in Angola (Redinha 1953) and Chewa in Malawi (van der Merwe and
Avery 1987) and contrary to the widely reported taboos that forbid women in
menses from contact with the furnace either because of their polluting condition or
because they are too hotthe latter an acknowledgement that menstruation is
associated with hotness in females, an attribute also widely associated with sexual
intercourse (Herbert 1993). The second ritea blood sacrifice that saturates the
furnace and the bellows as well as the charge of sinter and ore on top (including a
medicinal bundle, nsamba, that acts as an aphrodisiac)occurred immediately
before smelting commenced and immediately after the beer spitting ritual, with
some adjustments in the 1979 sequence (Fig. 6).5
5

This ritual using blood sacrifice was variably applied. Normally practiced upon the initiation of a new
furnace, it was delayed until the third smelt of 1979 (because black goats were expensive and unavailable
before the first smelt). It was practiced again upon the resumption of smelting in 1984.

Embodiment of African Iron Smelting Furnaces as Human Figures

275

The tropic power of blood sacrifice through the social agency of male smelters in
this case rests very deeply upon the potency of blood sprayed upon the furnace
charge, made up of partly sintered iron and other slags that are referenced as
giving off water, that is, as flowing through the furnace. Covered with purifying
sacrificial blood, the metonymical menstruation of the furnace is manifest.
Indispensible for conception yet simultaneously holding properties of sterility,
purifying while having the potential to pollute, these dualities of menses parallel the
sacrificial blood that represents both death and life (Herbert 1993). Luc de Heusch
opens important insights into this process with his exegesis of Dogon myth in which
Blood from throat slitting, called menses of the earth, contains the life of the
world (Griaule and Dieterien 1965:23435, cited in de Heusch 1985:138), a
condition in which Sacrifice isa beneficent cosmic menstruation (de Heusch
1985:137). The Barongo ritual performersthemselves splattered by the sacrificial
blood and tropically transformed by the blood into womenembody smelting
furnaces as females in menses. Herbert (1993) has also observed that among the
Ekondo of Zaire running slag is compared to menses. Through such ritual
performances, then, the [termite] clay furnaces of the Barongo become whole
females, but notably without surface characteristics such as breasts, vaginas, and
waist beadsa form of figuration lacking outward materiality.
This second cycle of menstrual cleansingthe first having occurred during
the cleansing and impregnation of the furnace pitwas soon followed by the
injection of salt into the tuyeres, a metonym for impregnation and a ritual
performance that also draws from a healing repertoire. During one period of
particularly troubling tuyere failure, the head smelter brought a tray with salt and
omunsesene root (excavated at the iron ore site) to the furnace, and at each failing
tuyere, he took a little salt and root, spit on them, and shoved the concoction to the
end of the tuyere (deep inside the furnace), later explaining that this would
improve the yield (Schmidt 1996).6 He shortly returned with more salt and pieces
of the musengati root, which he wet in his mouth and dipped in salt before also
shoving them down each tuyere to open them for better flow, a metonymical ritual
creating sperm flow to increase reproductive success, process bearing some
resemblance to a Nyakyusa (southern Tanzania) ritual after first menstruation,
when a young girl has a pungent tasting root pushed into her mouth along with salt
through a funnel (Wilson 1957:87). Wilson believed this ritual signified
intercourse while the medicine is a prophylactic against the pain of intercourse
and menstruation. Beyond this, it is important to note that both salt and white clay
are widely known metonyms for semen (Schmidt 1997). When the Barongo ritual
specialist and head smelter use salt in this manner, by their bodily gestures and
incantations they are shooting [quickly shoving] their seeds into a hot female.
There are yet other ritual processes that irregularly appear as part of the Barongo
bricolage, amplifying the earlier reproductive interpretationsamong them a
prohibition that appeared during the second smelt of 1979; the head smelter
announced that he did not wash since making charcoal and would continue in an
unwashed state until smelting was complete (cf. de Rosemond 1943). This bears
6

A full exegesis of all ritual applications is not possible in this space. They varied considerably from
smelt to smelt, defying any notion that they must follow a prescribed chane opratoire.

276

Schmidt

close affinities to a puberty rite of passage among the Nyakyusa, where girls
reaching menstruation are secluded and not allowed to wash for a month, again
indicating that a complete female reproductive cycle is the structuring principle.7

Internal Embodiments Among the Fipa

The smelting furnaces of the Fipa, an agricultural people living just to the East of
Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania, are likely the best known, most widely cited, and
most studied natural draft furnaces (Barndon 1992, 1996, 2001; Greig 1937;
Lechaptois 1913; Mapunda 1995; Robert 1949; Wembah-Rashid 1969; Wise 1958;
Willis 1981). The tall natural draft furnaces of the Fipa are called iluungu, a term
connected to Ulungu or the land of the Lungu people to the West. This term is linked
to the Tabwa (living West of Lake Tanganyika) use of the verb ilunga, itself derived
from a verb that means Putting salt in ones food or metaphorically, uniting
sexually (Barndon 2001:286; Roberts 1991:250). Salt is a key ingredient in many
iron smelting operations throughout the larger East African/Central African region.
Like the Barongo, the Fipa smelters draw extensively on the local pharmacopeia,
mostly taking the form of various medicinal barks (ingailo) and other natural
products with curative properties. Some barks with white sap were collected and
used because they were likened to breast milk or sperm, other substances such as a
red fruit (isuuke)a metaphor for blood and women (Willis 1967; Barndon 2001)
figured prominently in ritual performance when placed in the foundation trench.
Some ritual performances at Fipa furnaces observed during the early part of the
twentieth century throw considerable light on the sexual dualities that result from
some ritual applications. According to Wyckaert (1914), after a labor force had been
gathered, the laborers vetted for relative purity or pollution, and a first night spent
maintaining sexual abstinence, the smelters smeared their foreheads with white clay
before going to collect wood and burn charcoal. While kaolin is used for ritual
purification in many cultures of the region and is associated with male authority
among the Fipa, as noted earlier, it is also commonly used in smelting rituals as a
trope for semen. The Chokwe of Angola, for example, paint the breasts of their
furnace with a white clay slurry and with a line running to the pubic area on their
furnaces (Herbert 1993:34, 4546), while the Haya of northwestern Tanzania poured
a kaolin slurry over the medicinal and magical items they placed in a small pit in the
furnace floor (Schmidt 1997)both unequivocal gestures of impregnation.
The significance of Wyckaerts observation is revealed when all ritual magic and
other objects in the medicine basket (intaangala) were taken from the magical basket
and cut into various sized pieces by several supervising smelters (Fig. 7); these
smelters colored their foreheads with the red powder unnkolo that is a potent
metaphor for blood and women, a ritual in which the smelters become metonyms for
females. Though they cannot contain the blood or menses of women, by being
smeared by unnkolo, the ontology of the ritual transformation means that their
bodies contain feminine attributes. This embodiment of the smelters as women
complements their earlier performance as sexually potent males (ritually smeared
7

This is also a prohibition applied to ritual specialists among the Bazinza (Bjerke 1981).

Embodiment of African Iron Smelting Furnaces as Human Figures

277

Fig. 7 A Fipa smelting furnace

with smelters in foreground
sorting magical substances.
These tall (34 m) furnaces
operate by natural draft and are
buttressed by a scaffold-like arrangement upon which smelters
stand to complete construction.
Courtesy of Randi Barndon,
University of Bergen.

with kaolin clay), dual identities that capture the liminal ambiguity of male smelters
in control of a female furnace.
Dual identities arise again when both female and male children engage and
activate potent medicinesone of them signifying menstruationaccompanied by
blood sacrifice at the initiation of the furnace foundation. Blood sacrifice was
conducted by two childrena boy and a girl (Barndon 2001; Wise 1958)who
placed the medicines and magical substances (now called fingila or things which
enter in their active state) in the foundations trench (Bardon 2001:176). While the
girl held the cock, the boy cut off its head and sprinkled the blood over the ritual
offerings, one of a variety of ritual treatments with the cocks blood. Dualities are
again manifest in both pre-pubescent genders acting as transforming agents in a
ritual that also splashed blood on the tuyere openings and the entry into the furnace.
Importantly for our purposes here is that among the ritual devices taken into and left
inside the furnace is the red unnkolo powder, a powerful signifieralong with other
magical devices to transform the furnace into a reproductive femalethat Fipa ritual
performance uses to embody the furnace as a complete biological woman, much like
Barongo practices, without outward forms of this figuration.
Fipa ritual is replete with many other practices of embodiment, among them ritual
performances that treat the furnace as a new bride, decorating it with flowers that are
used on brides during nuptial ceremonies and also festooning it with black cloth,
said to signify a young bride who is pregnant (Barndon 2001). These ritual
performances additionally amplify the female embodiment of the Fipa furnace as a
fecund bride. Unlike the surface treatments of the Shona and Chokwe, there are no
material signatures for such practices, which leads us to a finer awareness that most
of the ritual performances of interest to the anthropologist doing the archaeology of

278

Schmidt

these baked clay artifacts are without external materiality but intimately linked to a
large array of ancillary ritual treatments. It is easier to recognize embodiment when
there is an inscribed waist band or breasts applied to furnaces, yet even without these
outward manifestations, the materiality of these furnaces incorporate a panoply of
ritual embodimentssome of them just as potent and transforming as those that left
behind material signatures. This realization, that ritual performance is such a rich
repository of knowledge, compels us to understand as much as we possibly can
about the inseparable domains of ritual practice and iron technology, imagining that
more nuanced knowledge can lead us to appreciate and link together obscure clues
the red-tipped tuyeres, the presence of specific species of tree in furnaces affiliated
with ancestors, fertility, protection against sorcery, deposits of salt, the head of a
cockall of which point to a larger array of ritual meanings that through
ethnography reveal the social agency of the transformers who once created these
ingenious female representations in baked clay.
Social agency in iron smelting contexts is now understood to be a much more
inclusive practice than just the individual male ritual agent. As the ritual healer
administers to his patient, he only does so by involving his cohorts in a collective
action, one in which all subscribe to the patients needs, whether they be increased
protection against displeased ancestors or the use of more potent apotropaic drugs to
ward off sorcerers jealous of the smelters economic prosperity. Often these healing
and apotropaic devices have an enduring materiality, some of which may be
preserved for thousands of years if the circumstances for preservation are good
(Schmidt 1997; Schmidt and Mapunda 1997). The inclusion of women in their
reproductive prime shows that an emphasis on exclusionary taboos regarding
females, and particularly those in menses, has been widely if not wildly exaggerated
in Africa. Gender exclusion has been linked to issues of power of males over female
reproduction, but this rendering of the reproductive paradigm denies the biological
elements of renewal and regeneration that are distinctively female. The inclusion of
females as transformative ritual agents and the integration of ritual metonyms
pertaining to menses show us that gender dichotomies do not prevail, that in fact the
ritual practices of iron smelters and their female companions/wives are social
declarations illustrating a gender unity manifest in a host of ritual treatments ranging
from salty tuyeres to blood-soaked flowing slag. Joining the genders is to generate,
to create, and to transform (Sanders 1997:243), but once unified it takes division of
the union to regain transformative powera process of combination and separation
that we see expressed in the embodied performances of Fipa male and female
dancing/singing around the furnace, and then the exclusion of females while the
male smelters alone sing their bawdy songs and make bodily gestures of intercourse
(Barndon 2001).

Concluding Thoughts, or Post-coital Smoking [Furnaces]

Joyces (2005) observation that the body as lived experience is also a site of
embodied agency is appropriate to understanding how the social agency of African
iron smelters plays out in the transforming rituals that they enact inside, around, and
on clay figures that we commonly reference as iron smelting furnaces. The meanings

Embodiment of African Iron Smelting Furnaces as Human Figures

279

of baked clay furnaces, some with outward forms of the female anatomy and others
with subtle internal material clues leading to both male and female sexuality, are
interwoven with many layers of ritual performance, taboo, healing practices, fear of
ancestors, and concerns over evil forces. Through embodied agency, human
emotion, bodily needs, and well-being are internalized within the furnace, a
container that receives healing potions, medicinal cures for physical (infertility,
erectile dysfunction) afflictions as well as mental afflictions (angry ancestors), and
prophylactics for fatal, evil afflictions (sorcery and witchcraft). These attributes bring
to the surface the importance that ritual may have played in the embodiment of
figurines. Figuration does not lie within materiality alone. It must be activatedone
of the missing pieces in studies of figurines. The ritual transformations of African
iron smelting furnaces may, then, provide avenues of inquiry for those who are
trying to understand the ritual meanings and actions held within those materialities,
especially the possible role of medicinal curesthe rubbing of figurines with
transforming herbs and substances including bodily substancessome of which
should be discernable though particular scientific analyses.
We have seen here that the surface materiality of the female form in African iron
smelting furnaces is not as potent a trope for human reproduction as what occurs
inside the furnacewhere the metaphorical organs are locatedstimulated and set
into motion by powerful medicinal cures for a variety of afflictions mentioned
above. While the gendered attributes of furnaces are evoked through the form of the
external furnace, much more important are the internal embodiments, where highly
charged sexual characteristics such as menstruation and semen are introduced
through ritual devices that tropically transform the belly of the furnace into a human
uterus in full reproductive cycleleaving behind material signatures of that
transformative process. This is the junction where explicit external figuration fades
in potency when compared to the internal forces set in motion by tropes activated by
technological agents. If the internal materialities of these transformative devices tend
toward the ephemeral in the archaeological record (e.g., it is virtually impossible to
observe red smears of blood on the tips of burned tuyeres), we must recall that
many of these devicesbundles of charred bark, trees, and other physical items
may be well preserved and thus read and interpreted if we have sufficient
ethnographic knowledge to posit their intentionality.
We have also observed that when both genders are identified with figurative
clay furnaces through embodied sensual gestures and sounds, then both are united
within the same domain, a relationship of combination and contiguitykey
ingredients of metonymyresulting in an integrative identity (Ricoeur 1977)a
collapse of Cartesian gendered dichotomies that have too long informed
interpretations of African iron smelting. This unity, however, will rarely be
manifest as part of the clay figure. Rather, this unityalso signified by the internal
placement of male objects (tuyeres) and powerful ritual male tropes (e.g., salt/
semen)creates a potent life force that is only unveiled with meticulous
ethnographic understanding of ritual embodiment.
Tropes do not act alone. They require the active intervention and application of
focused social agents, the iron smelters who seek a productive outcome from their
labors. These meticulously crafted clay figures cannot accommodate iron production
unless they are treated with powerful transforming and protective drugs as well as

280

Schmidt

magical devices. It is the ritual potency and the effect of the embodied rituals that
capture our interest and lead to our understanding of the materiality of the figure
itself. Any fixation with the external characteristics of these figures will miss the
deep embodiments within the furnacebundles of charred bark, wood, and other
physical itemsembodied evidence of concern over fertility, menstruation,
ancestors, and malicious neighbors and spirits.

References
Andah, B. (1995). Studying African societies in cultural context. In P. R. Schmidt & T. C. Patterson
(Eds.), Making alternative histories: The practice of archaeology and history in non-western settings
(pp. 149181). Santa Fe: SAR.
Aquina, Sister Mary (A. K. H. Weinrich). (1968). MutimwiA Note on the Waist Belt of the Karango.
NADA, 11:5.
Barndon, R. (1992). Traditional Ironworking among the Fipa: An ethnoarchaeological study from
Southwestern Tanzania, M. A. thesis, University of Bergen, Bergen.
Barndon, R. (1996). Fipa ironworking and its technological style. In P. R. Schmidt (Ed.), The culture and
technology of Africa iron production (pp. 4057). Gainesville: University Press of Florida.
Barndon, R. (2001). Masters of metallurgyMasters of metaphors: Iron working among the Fipa and the
Pangwa of SW-Tanzania. Bergen: Department of Archaeology, University of Bergen.
Bent, J. T. (1893). The ruined cities of Mashonaland. Green, London: Longmans.
Bernhard, F. O. (1963). Iron-smelting furnaces on Ziwa farm. South Africa Archaeological Bulletin, 18,
235236.
Bjerke, S. (1981). Religion and misfortune: The Bacwezi complex and other spirit cults of the Zinza of
Northwestern Tanzania. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
Boyd, B. (2002). Ways of eating/ways of being in the later epipalaeolithic (Natufian) Levant. In Y.
Hamilakis, M. Pluciennik & S. Tarlow (Eds.), Thinking through the body: Archaeologies of
corporeality (pp. 137152). New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum.
Childs, S. T. (1991). Technology, style, and iron smelting furnaces in Bantu-speaking Africa. Journal of
Anthropological Archaeology, 10, 332359.
Childs, S. T., & Dewey, W. (1996). Forging symbolic meaning in Zaire and Zimbabwe. In P. R. Schmidt
(Ed.), The culture and technology of African iron production (pp. 145171). Gainesville: University
Press of Florida.
Childs, S. T., & Killick, D. (1993). Indigenous African metallurgy: nature and culture. Annual Review of
Anthropology, 22, 317337.
Cline, W. B. (1937). Mining and metallurgy in Negro Africa. Menasha, WI: George Banta.
Connerton, P. (1989). How societies remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
De Heusch, L. (1985). Sacrifice in Africa: A structuralist approach. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
de Rosemond, C. C. (1943). Iron smelting in the Kahama district. Tanganyika Notes and Records, 16, 7984.
Dewey, W. (1990). Weapons for the ancestors. Iowa City: University of Iowa Video Production Unit.
Dewey, W. (1993). Sleeping beauties and other highlights from the Jerome L. Joss Collection at UCLA,
Fowler Museum of Culture History. Los Angeles: UCLA.
Gausset, Q. (2002). The cognitive rationality of taboos on production and reproduction in sub-Saharan
Africa. Africa, 72(4), 628654.
Gottlieb, A. (1982). Sex, fertility and menstruation among the Beng of the Ivory Coast: A symbolic
analysis. Africa, 52, 3447.
Green, E. C. (1999). Theories of contagious disease. Walnut Creek: AltaMira.
Greig, R. C. H. (1937). Iron smelting in Fipa. Tanganyika Notes and Records, 4, 7781.
Halbwachs, M. (1992 [1941,1955]). On collective memory (trans: Coser, L. A). Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Hamilakis, Y. (1999). Food technologies/technologies of the body: The social context of wine and oil
production and consumption in Bronze Age Crete. World Archaeology, 31(1), 3854.
Hamilakis, Y. (2002). The past as oral history: Towards an archeology of the senses. In Y. Hamilakis, M.
Pluciennik & S. Tarlow (Eds.), Thinking through the body: Archaeologies of corporeality (pp. 121
136). New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum.

Embodiment of African Iron Smelting Furnaces as Human Figures

281

Hamilakis, Y., Pluciennik, M., & Tarlow, S. (2002). Thinking through the body: Archaeologies of
corporeality. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum.
Herbert, E. (1993). Iron, gender, and power: Rituals of transformation in Africa societies. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Jackson, M. (1983). Thinking through the body: An essay on understanding metaphor. Social Analysis, 14,
127149.
Joyce, R. A. (2005). Archaeology of the body. Annual Review of Anthropology, 34, 139158.
Keane, W. (2005). Signs are not the garb of meaning: On the social analysis of material things. In D.
Miller (Ed.), Materiality (pp. 182205). Durham: Duke University Press.
Kirmayer, L. (1993). Healing and the invention of metaphor: The effectiveness of symbols revisited.
Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 17, 161195.
Kus, S. M. (1979). Archaeology and ideology: The symbolic organization of space. Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Lane, P. (2005). Barbarous tribes and unrewarding gyrations? The changing role of ethnographic
imagination in African archaeology. In A. B. Stahl (Ed.), African archaeology: A critical introduction
(pp. 2454). Oxford: Blackwell.
Lechaptois, A. (1913). Aux Rives du Tanganyika. Algiers: Maison Carr.
Lemonnier, P. (1986). The study of material culture today: Toward an anthropology of technical systems.
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 5, 147186.
Lemonnier, P. (1992). Elements for an anthropology of technology. Anthropology Papers, Museum of
Anthropology, University of Michigan, No. 18. Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1943 [1971]). Evolution et Techniques: LHomme et la Matire. Paris: Albin Michel.
Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1945 [1973]). Evolution et Techniques: Milieu et Techniques. Paris: Albin Michel.
Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1993). Gesture and speech (trans: Anna Bostock Berger). Cambridge: MIT.
Mapunda, B. B. (1995). An archaeological view of the history and variation of iron working in Southwestern Tanzania, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Florida, Gainesville
Meskell, L. M. (1998). The irresistible body and the seduction of archaeology. In D. Montserrat (Ed.),
Changing bodies, changing meanings: Studies on the human body in antiquity (pp. 139161).
London: Routledge.
Meskell, L. M. (2001). The Egyptian ways of death. Archaeological Papers of the American
Anthropological Association, 10(1), 2740.
Meskell, L. M. (2005). Objects in the mirror appear closer than they are. In D. Miller (Ed.), Materiality
(pp. 5171). Durham: Duke University Press.
Meskell, L. M., & Joyce, R. A. (2003). Embodied lives: Figuring ancient Maya and Egyptian experience.
London: Routledge.
Meskell, L. M., Nakamura, C., King, R., & Farid, S. (2008). Figured lifeworlds and depositional practices
at atalhyk. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 18(2), 139161.
Miller, D. (2005). Materiality: An introduction. In D. Miller (Ed.), Materiality (pp. 150). Durham: Duke
University Press.
Montserrat, D. (ed). (1998). Changing bodies, changing meanings: Studies on the human body in
antiquity. London: Routledge.
Redinha, J. (1953). Campanha etnografica ao Tchiboco, No. 1, Lisbon.
Ricoeur, P. (1977). The rule of metaphor: Multi-disciplinary studies of the creation of meaning in
language (trans: Czerny, R, McLaughlin, K., and Costello, J.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Robert, R. P. J. M. (1949). Croyances et Cotumes Magico-Religeuses Des Wafipa. Kipalapala, Tanzania:
Tanganyika Mission Press.
Roberts, A. F. (1991). Where the king is coming from. In Jacobsen-Wilding, A. (ed.), Body and space.
Acta Univesitatis Uppsalalensis, 16, Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology, Uppsala.
Robinson, K. R. (1961). Two iron-smelting furnaces from the Chibi native reserve, Southern Rhodesia.
South African Archaeological Bulletin, 16, 2022.
Rowlands, M. (2005). A materialist approach to materiality. In D. Miller (Ed.), Materiality (pp. 7287).
Durham: Duke University Press.
Rowlands, M. (2009). Africa on display: Curating postcolonial pasts in the Cameroon grassfields. In P.
Schmidt (Ed.), Postcolonial archaeologies in Africa (pp. 149162). Santa Fe: SAR.
Sanders, T. (1997). Making children, making chiefs: Gender, power and ritual legitimacy. Africa, 69(2),
238262.
Schmidt, P. R. (1996). Reconfiguring the Barongo: Reproductive symbolism and reproduction among a
work association of iron smelters. In P. R. Schmidt (Ed.), The culture and technology of African iron
production (pp. 74127). Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

282

Schmidt

Schmidt, P. R. (1997). Iron technology in East Africa: Symbolism, science, and archaeology.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Schmidt, P. R., & Mapunda, B. B. (1997). Reading ideology in the African archaeological record. Journal
of Anthropological Archaeology, 16, 73102.
Schmidt, R. A., & Voss, B. L. (eds). (2000). Archaeologies of sexuality. London: Routledge.
Stahl, A. B. (1993). Concepts of time and approaches to analogical reasoning in historical perspective.
American Antiquity, 58(2), 235260.
Tambiah, S. J. (1979). A performative approach to ritual. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tilley, C. (1999). Metaphor and material culture. Oxford: Blackwell.
Turner, T. (1991). We are Parrots, Twins are Birds: Play of tropes as operational structure. In J. W.
Fernandez (Ed.), Beyond metaphor: The theory of tropes in anthropology (pp. 121158). Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Turner, T. (1995). Social body and embodied subject: Bodiliness, subjectivity, and sociality among the
Kayapo. Cultural Anthropology, 10(2), 143170.
van der Merwe, N. J., & Avery, D. H. (1987). Science and magic in African technology: Traditional iron
smelting in Malawi. Africa, 57, 143172.
Van Wolputte, S. (2004). Hang on to yourself: Of bodies, embodiment, and selves. Annual Review of
Anthropology, 33, 251269.
Warnier, J.-P. (2001). A praxeological approach to subjectivation in a material world. Journal of Material
Culture, 6(1), 524.
Wembah-Rashid, J. A. R. (1969). Iron workers in Ufipa. Bulletin of the International Committee of Urgent
Anthropological Research, 37, 425452.
Wilkie, L. (2000). Magical passions: Sexuality and African-American archaeology. In R. A. Schmidt & B.
L. Voss (Eds.), Archaeologies of sexuality (pp. 129142). London: Routledge.
Willis, R. (1967). The head and the loins, Lvi-Strauss and beyond. Man, 2(3), 510534.
Willis, R. (1981). A state in the making. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Wilson, M. (1957). Rituals of kinship among the Nyakyusa. London: Oxford University Press.
Wise, R. (1958). Iron smelting in Ufipa. Tanganyika Notes and Records, 51, 106111.
Wyckaert, R. P. (1914). Forgerons paens et forgerons crtiens au Tanganyika. Anthropos, IX, 371380.