Credited to Central African Republic. The 2000 BCE dating is contested by archaeologists who question the association between the dated charcoal and the iron remains.
How it began
Oboui is an archaeological site in the west of the Central African Republic, excavated by the archaeologist Etienne Zangato. There he uncovered the remains of an iron forge. The forge itself is described as undated, but the excavation yielded eight consistent radiocarbon dates of about 2000 BCE.
Zangato published the site in a 2007 monograph. In 2010, with Augustin Holl, he set Oboui within a wider argument in the Journal of African Archaeology, in an article titled On the Iron Front, that ironworking developed in this part of Africa from the third millennium BCE onward.
Who pushed back
The dates are contested. If they hold, Oboui would be the oldest iron-working site known anywhere, and a claim of that size has drawn demands for stronger proof. The central doubt is whether the radiocarbon dates really belong to the iron working, since the forge itself is not directly dated.
Shadreck Chirikure answered Zangato and Holl in the same journal in 2010 with a paper titled On Evidence, Ideas and Fantasy, and Bernard Clist reviewed the radiocarbon record for early iron in Central Africa in 2013. The question remains open.
What lasted
Whatever its true age, Oboui has become a reference point in the debate over where African ironworking came from. Older theories held that iron technology reached sub-Saharan Africa from the Near East or from the Nile valley. Early dates from Oboui and from other early smelting sites across the continent are used to support the opposing view, that iron metallurgy was invented independently in Africa and developed separately in several regions. Because so much rests on it, the site is cited both by those who argue for an African invention of iron and by those who urge caution about the dating.
