PALEORIENT Vol. 3 1975-1976-1977

INTERPRETATIONS OF PREHISTORIC TECHNOLOGY FROM ANCIENT EGYPTIAN AND OTHER SOURCES.

Part II* : Prehistoric arrow forms in Africa as shown by surviving examples of the traditional arrows of the San Bushmen.

/. DESMOND CLARK

Outside the Nile valley and the Mediterranean littoral, bronze technology made very little impression on the African continent. It was, therefore, not until the spread of iron-working that metal began effectively to replace stone, bone and hardwood as the cutting and piercing parts of projectile weapons. By the middle of the first millennium B.C. iron was being worked at Meroe (1) but stone arrowheads and other implements continued to be made further south in the Gezira until the fourth century A.D. or later (2). By the third century B.C. iron was replacing bronze in everyday use in the Punic settlements in the Maghreb and there is reference in the middle of the second century to iron smelters (3). Copper began in part to replace stone for arrowheads in the northern Sahara by the middle of the first century B.C. and in turn was superseded by iron from about the 3rd century B.C. (4). In the central Sahara iron objects dating to the fourth century A.D. have been found in tombs in the Fezzan and Hoggar (5).

Iron technology appears to have been well developed in the Niger/Benue region of west Africa by с 400 B.C. but if the evidence from Daima is significant, iron was still not in general use in the west African savanna before the 5th or 6th century A.D. (6). During the 4th to 3rd centuries B.C., iron was introduced into pre-Axumite Ethiopia and by the sixth century A.D. there is reference by Cosmas Indicopleustes to a trade in iron with the region of the "sources of the

Nile" (7). However, stone continued in use in Ethiopia for some purposes and obsidian microliths were still being made in Begemeder around the beginning of the present era (8) and probably appreciably later further south in the Galla Lakes area where the use of obsidian continues to the present day (9).

In East and South-Central Africa, the use of stone and the manufacture of microliths continued into the second millennium A.D. where they are known from the three East African countries and from Zambia and Malawi (10), and clearly form an integral part of the tool-kit of hunting/gathering groups that continued to live in symbiosis with pastoral or mixed farming peoples working iron and other metals. Again, in South West Africa copper beads occur with a microlithic (Wilton) assemblage dating to 870 ± 100 (A.D. 1080) (11). As metal became more readily available to the autochthonous hunting populations, through barter and other means, it was cold-hammered into knives and projectile points so that the stone industry underwent rapid change and technical deterioration and eventually disappeared.

The iron arrowheads that replaced the stone, bone and wooden heads initially often showed considerable resemblance in form to those they replaced. This has already been described in connection with the Egyptian and Meroitic copper and iron heads (12) and it is