EXARC Journal Issue 2021/1

Background: The State of an Art?

Over the last three decades, bloomery iron smelting has moved from the largely theoretical to the practical. Although there were certainly earlier attempts via experimental process to build workable furnaces, most of these attempts were basically unsuccessful, at least in terms of actual iron production. Early researchers too often undertook (or at least only formally reported on) limited test series (one or two attempts) and many concentrated far too much on slag, not on the production of metallic iron itself.

Throwing Sticks

Background

The design and the construction of the Roman saddle has not received much academic attention since the work done by Peter Connolly in 1986 (Connolly, 1986, p. 353) and Connolly with Carol von Driel in 1991 (Connolly, P, van Driel-Murray, C, 1991, pp. 33-50) .

The renowned weaver Peter Collingwood briefly mentioned such belts in his book The Techniques of Tablet Weaving (Collingwood, 1982, pp.219-220). Not long before he died in 2008, he contributed a couple of pages on these belts to the book Minority Textile Techniques: Costumes from South-West China (Collingwood, 2007, pp.28-29).