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Nigerian Faces and Interfaces

how he found it, and about how the rest of us might profit from his experience. Hence the slightly megalomanic title. Basically, he contends that he picked upon Katuruka because oral tradition told him that here the Hinda had taken over an older, Chwezi shrine. So far, so good. Here indeed was a sensible indication that the site might be older than the Hinda dynasty. What one cannot accept, however, is that to get behind the Hinda occupation should necessarily have led to Early Iron Age discoveries. From A.D. 200 to 1700 is a long period, not to be accounted for by traditions of a Bachwezi shrine or myths of an iron tower, especially when the evidence is against rather than in favour of continuity of occupation. The interval between 500 B.C. and A.D. 100 is again a long one, and if the earlier date should be confirmed, it would be becoming to acknowledge that there had been an element of luck as well as of judgment in his discovery. Professor Schmidt tells us that one of the general goals of his study was ' to collect, analyse and use historical oral tradition which was linked to archaeological sites', and that in the event he came to realize that ' the types of oral tradition which I had least expected to be useful in combination with archaeology, [namely] mythology and folklore, proved to be far more essential than royal and clan histories'. He talks rather grandly of mythology as 'a locational device for prehistoric sites'. In fact, however, it would appear that his careful researches into the local sources of iron-ore and wood fuel, and into the techniques employed in smelting and forging during the early colonial period, had played at least as important a part as any structural analysis of Haya mythology. In the course of his preliminary investigations he found one slag heap 120 metres long by 2-3 metres wide and approximately 2 metres high. When it is remembered that it takes 80 tons of wood to produce one ton of smelted iron, such accumulations are indeed suggestive of the huge process of forest clearance around the western shores of Lake Victoria already postulated by Kendall and Livingstone, on the basis of pollen analysis, as having begun about the middle of the first millennium B.C. It is to be hoped that Professor Schmidt's further publications will not be much longer delayed.