Iron Age Innovations: The Temporal Witnesses, Volume 4

By Ricardo Gómez

The Temporal Witnesses Volume 4: Iron Age Innovations

Nobody has to ban a book they wrote themselves.

The Patrimony Foundation 2.0 is credited in small type inside the front cover of Cuchu Ramirez's world history textbook. It does not need to ban anything. It writes the books, pays for them, and takes the federal money away from any school that teaches otherwise. Professors are being arrested three in a morning: textiles, water engineering, navigation, none of it European. A federal agent has been to her family's restaurant. He did not go there to find anything out. He went so that her father and her t a and her grandmother would know he had been.

Dr. Sarah Crow Feather puts an obsidian blade into Cuchu's hand and gives her the arithmetic. Forty-eight hours there is forty-eight minutes here, sixty to one, and it has never once been anything else.

Three Civilizations. Thirty-Four Hours. Nothing That Can Be Carried Home.

PARACAS, PISCO VALLEY, PERU: A green seam of river cut through white desert, low stone buildings joined by shaded walkways, water running in cut channels out to the gardens. Healers open a boy's skull with blades of black glass that take an edge finer than a modern steel scalpel, and Cuchu has her hands on the wound before anybody asks who she is. Nine people in that valley can do the whole procedure. There were eleven before the winter.

ADENA, OHIO RIVER VALLEY: Earthworks on terrace after terrace along the river, copper carried down from the Great Lakes and shell up from the Gulf, a thousand miles in each direction, and no city anywhere, because nobody built one. Nothing is run from one place and all of it arrives where it is supposed to arrive. A man named Sokan has walked eleven days to ask for one season of training, and stands in the circle while the woman he trusts spends her credit on two strangers instead.

NOK, WEST AFRICAN SAVANNA, NIGERIA: Furnaces built to one design and repeated across the valley floor, the ground beaten flat around each of them in the same shape. Terracotta heads at close to life size, each one somebody in particular, with pierced pupils that follow you down the row. Then a bloom comes out of the furnace and opens along a line under the second hammer blow. Nobody shouts. Nobody is blamed. Nobody knows why, and the answer will take a year, or it will not come.

They come home thirty-four minutes later. The pendant clears, the blade goes the colour of dishwater, the chisel gives up its edge on the floor of the chamber, and by the bus ride what is left in a jacket pocket is grit. Nothing they were given survives the journey.

What survives is nine seconds of pressure and elevation, shown on her grandmother's wrist in the back room of the family restaurant, and one sentence from a Nok smith about changing one thing at a time and saying out loud what you changed.

Perfect for fans of: N. K. Jemisin's moral seriousness, Nnedi Okorafor's Nigeria, and anyone who wants to know what a workshop sounds like when nobody in it is guessing.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0FR2HY9CP
• ISBN13: 9798264999031
• Release Date: September 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 66 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 6.0" x 9.0"