Inagina, Last House of Iron

The idea of smelting iron--that is, processing the raw metal to remove impurities and make it suitable for manufacturing metal objects--generally conjures images of an enormous wooden and concrete building, hideous welts on the land created by machine-assisted mining, and mass production creating belching steams of smoke and fire. But the first Iron Age smelters were not in buildings nor were they efforts of mass production. The documentary called Inagina, Last House of Iron, describes the ancient method of iron smelting still used, if rarely, in West Africa.