Article Dans Une Revue Annales d'Éthiopie Année : 2024

Towards a history of metals and metallurgists in Ethiopia

Résumé

Metallurgy holds a special place in human history because it is the activity in which the mastery of natural resources is the most advanced. It involves a long and complex operating chain during which the physical and chemical properties of raw materials change. Mastering of metallurgical processes means being able to produce materials with properties that do not exist in the natural state. These metals will find themselves used in all fields: agriculture, crafts, armament, ornamentation, and construction. The identification of these mechanisms is an essential issue in understanding the societies behind them and those that learn from others or consume the products of others societies. Research over the past 30 years demonstrates that the history of metals in Africa escapes any evolutionary perception, which would force each society to pass successively through the Copper, Bronze, and Iron Ages, as in Eurasia and thus obeying a technological determinism (Robion-Brunner, 2018). In Ethiopia, the archaeological and geological data currently available shows that ferrous and non-ferrous objects were used very early on (from the pre-Aksumite period, 8th to 4th c. BC) and that rich and diverse metal deposits are available. This diversity of uses and resources may have led to particular learning mechanisms among the craftsmen. No comprehensive account of the history of metals in this part of Africa has been established and thus we are not familiar with the interactions between societies and their environment, the processes of the invention, innovation, and diffusion of techniques, the social, ritual and symbolic dimensions of craftsmanship, the relationship between power and wealth production, or the networks and circuits of economic exchange, etc. In this paper, we propose to remedy this by drawing

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hal-04810582 , version 1 (02-12-2024)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04810582 , version 1

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Caroline Robion-Brunner, Hiluf Berhe Woldeyohannes, Alebachew Belay. Towards a history of metals and metallurgists in Ethiopia. Annales d'Éthiopie, 2024, 35. ⟨hal-04810582⟩
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