Angola · Metalwork / Blacksmithing
Umbundu-language tool names documented include specific terms for individual iron implements; the blacksmith's protective spirit-figure is a carved wooden object placed beside the anvil
The smelting and forging of iron by Ovimbundu blacksmiths of the Benguela Highlands, central Angola, documented in exceptional ethnographic detail by Field Museum anthropologist Wilfrid D. Hambly during 1929-30 fieldwork based at Elende. Ore was smelted with charcoal in shallow pits -- an early-20th-century Portuguese explorer, Serpa Pinto, directly observed iron-ore shafts and smelting pits near Cubango in 1878, noting the iron was sometimes tempered with ox-grease and salt -- though by the time of Hambly's own fieldwork fifty years later, the old smelting furnace was no longer in active use at Elende, with blacksmiths instead working scrap iron, a documented technological and material shift specifically noted at Dundo half a century before Hambly's visit. The blacksmith's craft is embedded in ritual: final ceremonies in the initiation of a young blacksmith involve the sacrifice of animals and the sprinkling of the smith's tools with their blood, and a small carved wooden spirit-figure -- hollow in some examples, with a detachable head -- is placed beside the blacksmith's anvil, its indwelling spirit understood to assist the smith directly in his work. The forge itself is worked with hide bellows, a hammer, tongs, and a punch, producing tools, weapons, and ornamental brass bracelets; a ceremonial ax, formerly used for beheading slaves at the death of a king, and axes still used to strike the fire at the founding of a new village, illustrate iron's deep embedding in Ovimbundu political and religious ritual life alongside its purely utilitarian function.
Risk level: Critically Endangered · Not independently inscribed
The hand-building of earthenware vessels by Ovimbundu women of the Benguela Highlands, central Angola, documented in direct sequential field photography by Field Museum anthropologist Wilfrid D.
The coiled construction of flat basketry plaques and vessels by Ovimbundu women of the Benguela Highlands, central Angola, directly photographed in progress by Field Museum anthropologist Wilfrid D.
The preparation of funge, Angola's national staple dish, a smooth, dense, stretchy porridge made by gradually whisking cassava flour (or, in some regional and family variants, cornmeal or millet flour) into boiling salted water.
The carving of wooden Mwana Pwo masks and seated ancestor-figure statues (popularly known by their Portuguese name, O Pensador, 'The Thinker') by the Chokwe people of northeastern Angola, extending into the southern Democratic Republic of…
The tracing of one-stroke geometric figures on smoothed sand or ash by the Lunda Cokwe (Chokwe) and neighboring peoples of eastern Angola, using a matrix of dots pressed into the surface as fixed anchor points around which the drawing's…
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Bastar Dokra is the lost-wax (cire perdue) bronze casting tradition of the Ghadwa community of Bastar, Chhattisgarh — one of two major Indian Dokra traditions, the other being the West Bengal/Odisha variant (CRAFT-0060).
The carving and polishing of Whitby jet — the fossilized wood (Jurassic monkey puzzle tree, Araucaria mirabilis) from the shale cliffs of the North Yorkshire coast near Whitby, worked as a gemstone for personal ornament since the Bronze…
The dinanderie tradition of Dinant — the making of the hammered copper and brass objects (jugs, ewers, baptismal fonts, lecterns, chandeliers) that take their name from the Meuse valley city of Dinant, whose metalworkers dominated European…
The carving of ceremonial bowls, batons, statues, and figures from dark hardwood, embellished with intricate inlaid patterns of iridescent nautilus shell set into carved recesses — a technique the Metropolitan Museum of Art identifies as…
The forging of the kris (keris) — the distinctive asymmetrical, often wavy-bladed dagger indigenous to the Malay Archipelago and explicitly named 'the Malays' unique and ancient weapon' among Brunei's core traditional handicrafts.