The African Iron Age

A textbook providing the only comprehensive and up-to-date account of African history between 500 B.C. and 1400 A.D. Also useful to students of archaeology.

Africa in the Iron Age is a comprehensive and authoritative introduction to African history between about 500 B.C. and A.D. 1400. The authors are not so much concerned with a particular technological revolution as the enormous changes - political, social and economic - that took place during the period 500 B.C.-A.D. 1400 all over the African continent. The book falls into three parts. Early chapters describe conditions about 500 B.C. when North Africa is already in the Bronze Age, Middle Africa is engaged in Stone Age farming and south of the Sahara most men live by hunting and gathering food. Between 500 B.C. and A.D. 1000 life in settled communities becomes normal throughout the continent. Finally, the Iron Age sees the rise of state systems, the development of long-distance trade and the spread of Islam and Monophysite Christianity. Any study of this period has to combine historical and archaeological methods in the search for evidence and in the subsequent interpretation of data. While literary evidence does exist for the period, Iron Age archaeology necessarily supplies most of the evidence examined. Roland Oliver is a leading African historian and the author of several standard books on the subject. Brian Fagan is an acknowledged expert on African Iron Age archaeology.

This new edition of the popular school history book has been thoroughly revised to bring it fully up to date. It provides a stimulating account of Central African history from the Iron Age to the liberation struggle and the successful achievement of Zimbabwe's national independence.

First Published in 1994. This research guide was written as a comprehensive, though by no means exhaustive, survey of the literature pertinent to studying the indigenous complex societies of south central Africa. Although the paramount focus of the compilation was the archaeology of Great Zimbabwe, the author has drawn from a broad geographical area and a wider period of time than that usually associated with Zimbabwean culture in order to demonstrate the cultural background for the growth of monumental trading towns in south central Africa.

This book provides the first detailed description of the prehistory of the Loango coast of west-central Africa over the course of more than 3000 years.

The work of specialists archaeologists, historians, ethnologists, metallographs and sociologists gathered in this volume show the vitality of research being carried out on iron processing in Africa since as early as the third millennium B.C.