Long before the discovery of gold transformed Johannesburg in 1886, communities were already living, working and developing sophisticated technologies on the land now known as the city.

One of the clearest windows into that history is the ancient iron-smelting furnace at Melville Koppies, which dates to between 1060 and 1580.

On Heritage Day, September 24, visitors to Museum Africa in Newtown experienced the furnace through an augmented reality (AR) reconstruction created by the University of Johannesburg (UJ).

UJ’s Dr Izak Potgieter, who led the reconstruction, said the people associated with the furnace are understood to be ancestors of present-day Sesotho- and Setswana-speaking communities.

Read more: What the rocks of Melville Koppies have been waiting billions of years to tell us

The smelter provides evidence of sophisticated technological knowledge and a collaborative approach to producing iron implements. “It took 16 hours of work to produce a single implement,” Potgieter said, explaining that the process required generations of accumulated knowledge and apprenticeships between skilled elders and younger community members.

The work was also deeply connected to the wider community and its environment.
“It was a full community effort,” he said, describing a system in which different community members contributed to the production process and decisions about what implements were needed.

Also read: The secret life of Melville Koppies’ grasslands

For Potgieter, this history is important because Johannesburg’s story is often framed around its establishment as a gold-mining town in 1886. “The gold mining town was certainly founded then, but there was continuous occupation, as we said, tens of thousands of years into the past,” he said.
He believes the smelter offers a way to bring those overlooked chapters into the broader story of Johannesburg.

A key part of the AR reconstruction was determining how the surviving physical structure may have operated. UJ worked with historians, archaeologists, architectural heritage specialists, the Friends of Melville Koppies Committee and other contributors to develop a plausible reconstruction.

“An archaeologist’s favourite words are, ‘we simply don’t know’,” Potgieter said, describing the process as one of bringing different experts together to determine how the furnace could plausibly have functioned.
The result allows visitors to see the smelter come to life digitally, including flames and the production of iron implements.

Potgieter hopes the experience will challenge perceptions of pre-colonial African technology as primitive. “There was a lot of skill involved. It was a lot more deliberate than I think people give credit for,” he said.

For him, the greatest value of the experience is not simply seeing an ancient furnace reconstructed, but recognising that its story is part of Johannesburg’s story too. “I’ve lived in Johannesburg all my life. I’m in my 70s. I didn’t know that I was part of the story of the city,” he recalled one Setswana-speaking visitor telling him after experiencing the reconstruction in her own language.

The AR experience will give visitors another way to encounter that history – and a reminder that Johannesburg’s story stretches far beyond the gold rush.

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