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Iron technology developed independently in several parts of the world, including India and Africa.
Travois tracks
Parallel tracks have been found in fossilised mud at White Sands National Park, New Mexico, USA, and interpreted as the marks left by a travois: a timber frame used by Native Americans for transporting goods. Particularly associated with Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains region of North America, a travois is made by joining two long poles and a third shorter one to create an A-shaped frame. The shorter pole forms a platform to support the load, and the open end of the frame is typically attached to a harness and pulled by a horse.
In this case, the travois was pulled by humans, whose footprints have also survived in the fossilised mud. These have been dated to between 23,000 and 21,000 years ago using several different techniques, namely radiocarbon dating of seeds from the aquatic plant Ruppia cirrhosa and of pollen collected from the same stratigraphic horizons as the Ruppia seeds, along with optically stimulated luminescence ages of sediments from within the human footprint- bearing sequence (https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adh5007).
The discovery (published recently in the journal Quaternary Science Advances: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.qsa.2025.100274) constitutes the earliest evidence for the use of transport technology, and the fossil footprints (believed to have been made by at least six different individuals) provide some of the oldest direct evidence of a human presence in the Americas. Indigenous people were involved in the research as collaborators, site monitors, and members of the excavation team. Based on their own experiences, it was their suggestion that these enigmatic linear marks had been made by some form of travois; experimental archaeology subsequently confirmed this as a likely explanation.
The Iron Age in Tamil Nadu
Online encyclopaedias will tell you that Central Anatolia (in modern Turkey) is where the oldest evidence has been found for iron-making, and that mining, smelting, and forging on a significant scale dates from the period of the New Hittite Empire (c.1400-1200 BC).
There is now a growing body of evidence to suggest that iron technology developed independently in several parts of the world, including northern India and sub-Saharan Africa, around 2000 to 1800 BC, and that the widespread use of iron in many parts of the globe dates from around 1200 BC.
New discoveries are now being made that push these dates back even further in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, where archaeologists have discovered iron objects at six sites dating back to 3345-2953 BC. Knives, spears, and swords, an arrowhead, chisels, axes, hoes, and spades are among the objects found in graves and burial urns at Adichanallur, Sivagalai, Mayiladumparai, Kilnamandi, Mangadu, and Thelunganur. The remains of an iron-smelting furnace have been found at Kodumanal. Samples have been robustly dated in five laboratories around the world and the results are given in the report Antiquity of Iron by K Rajan and R Sivanantham, published in January 2025 by Tamil Nadu’s Department of Archaeology (http://www.tamildigitallibrary.in/admin/assets/book/TVA_BOK_0065866/TVA_BOK_0065866_Antiquity_of_iron.pdf).
The publication has sparked a lively discussion about whether southern India should be considered the birthplace of iron metallurgy, but Parth R Chauhan, Professor of Archaeology at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, believes this cannot be proven because there are so many parts of India where no research or archaeological excavation has taken place and where ‘Indian archaeology is in silent mode’.
Oishi Roy, a post-doctoral research fellow at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar and a specialist in early metallurgy, says that iron production represents a ‘technological shift, not a single-origin event’, and that ‘while it is clear that iron technology developed early in the Indian subcontinent, all the evidence suggests that it develops independently in multiple regions’.
Echoing this, Katragadda Paddayya, archaeologist and a former Director of Deccan College, the post-graduate Institute of Archaeology, Linguistics, Sanskrit, and Lexicography in Pune, says ‘this is just the starting point: we need to delve deeper into the origins of iron technology and these findings mark the beginning, not the conclusion’.
Etruscan iron-worker’s tomb
The ancient Etruscan people were skilled at metallurgy, creating masterpieces of bronze sculpture, such as the renowned Chimera of Arezzo that so amazed the Renaissance artist Benvenuto Cellini, who cleaned and repaired the bronze beast when it was discovered in 1553. Now a 2,500-year-old Etruscan tomb decorated with wall paintings has been uncovered in central Italy’s Tarquinia necropolis. Although the tomb had already been looted (probably in ancient times), the paintings decorating the walls have survived. As well as images of dancing men and women and a flautist – themes familiar from similar tombs and thought to represent the pleasures of the afterlife – the paintings show a metallurgical workshop. This led Daniele Federico Maras of the National Archaeological Museum of Florence to suggest that the deceased and their family might have been metalworkers.
Buddha in Berenike
Author and Indophile William Dalrymple has been particularly vocal in recent months in arguing that the world has underestimated the role of India as a crucible of trade, art, language, science, and spirituality over many millennia. In his recently published book The Golden Road: how ancient India transformed the world, he asserts that India was the principal trading partner of the Roman Empire and that hundreds of vessels regularly sailed between Egypt and India every year.
Evidence of this trade was discovered in 2022 at the Egyptian Red Sea port of Berenike, founded by Ptolemy II Philadelphus (r. 285-246 BC) and named after his mother, Berenice I of Egypt. During the Roman period, Berenike served as a key landing stage for goods imported from India, Sri Lanka, and other parts of Southeast Asia. When a Polish and American team of archaeologists excavated a storeroom in the forecourt of Berenike’s temple to the Egyptian goddess Isis, they found a finely carved marble statue of the Buddha, with a halo of sunrays around his head and a lotus by his left foot. It is thought that the statue was commissioned from an Egyptian carver and given to the temple as an offering by one or more merchants from India in the 2nd century AD.
The mix of goods traded through Roman-era Berenike included gems and pearls; woven mats and baskets; silk and cotton from Gujarat and the Indus delta; teak from Kerala; pots full of pepper, coriander seed, and tamarind; perfume ingredients; ivory; tortoiseshell; and even wild animals – finds included the skulls of elephants and the bones of rhesus monkeys and bonnet macaques from India – as well as beads from Vietnam and Java.
From Berenike, these were transported across the desert to the Nile, on to the Mediterranean port of Alexandria, and from there to the rest of the Roman Empire. On the other side of the Indian Ocean, excavations in India near the Keralan village of Pattinam have located one of the ports that probably traded with Berenike.
The demand from consumers for these luxuries was such that, according to Dalrymple, ‘one third of the Roman empire’s entire revenue was generated by taxes on trade with ancient India’. The evidence for such a claim was explored in a paper called ‘The Roman state and Red Sea trade revenue’, by Matthew Adam Cobb and Troy Wilkinson, published in 2022 (https://doi.org/10.4000/books.momeditions.16401).
The ancient Greek geographer Strabo (c.63 BC-AD 24) tells us that a 25% tax was levied on Indian Ocean goods when they entered Egypt via the Red Sea ports, and that another 25% was charged on those same goods when shipped from Alexandria to the other provinces of the Empire. Several models have been created by scholars to try to estimate this revenue, with figures as low as 10 million and as high as 270 million sestertii annually. The latter figure, if it represents a quarter of the value of the goods taxed, implies that Indian imports into Egypt were worth over a billion sestertii per annum. By comparison, Caesar imposed tribute taxes of 40 million sestertii on the lands he conquered in Gaul.
The paper by Cobb and Wilkinson argues that the 270 million sestertii figure is too high and that the actual Roman state revenue was probably between 75 and 120 million sestertii during the 1st and 2nd centuries AD – not quite what some have suggested, but still a very impressive figure. No wonder, then, that Pliny the Elder (AD 23-79) mentions that cohorts of archers were carried on board ships sailing to India, to offer protection against pirates.
Chris Catling is an archaeologist and writer, fascinated by the off-beat and the eccentric in the heritage world.
