### ch05p228 Social and Political Change in West Africa's First Commercial Age <blockquote class=paraphrase>Villages in a post-iron economy tend to specialize in different kinds of manufacturoing, i.e. a village of smelters and smiths, a village of leatherworkers, a village of potters, etc. The products of each occupation were taken to the central market in the larger town near where the artisans' villages clustered. There they would be bought by local consumers and traders.</blockquote> This jives with my understanding of places like Pittsburg being a steel city and Detroit being a car city and Milan being a fashion city and Mirano being a glass-making city but I didn't realize this extended to towns around a city or villages around a town. <blockquote class=paraphrase>When ironworking first became a thing in Africa, the ironworkers surrounded their activities with taboos and rituals to ensure success, which, intentionally or not, basically created a monopoly. Eventually, other specialists like the leatherorkers and the potters started to claim similar kinds of ritual-esque status for themselves, passing their skills down via lineage. This was at first pretty similar to guilds, but then the occupational groupings started marrying in-round and then became castes. </blockquote> It never occurred to me that this is how castes might have developed. I wonder how much the desire to access one lineage's secrets might have led to this sort of marrying in-round? - [[The Civilizations of Africa by Christopher Ehret#ch05p228 Social and Political Change in West Africa's First Commercial Age|View in Vault]]