smelting

On 13 July 2024 the village of Daugailiai celebrated the 770th year of its founding on with a festival that included demonstrations and experiments in bronze casting. Daugailiai is a village in Utena County in Northeast Lithuania. The village features a hillfort, which is dated to 1st millennium BC-beginning of 1st Millenium AD, upon which a castle was built in 1254 and...

Introduction

“Vikings unwittingly made their swords stronger by trying to imbue them with spirits.
Iron Age Scandinavians only had access to poor quality iron, which put them at a tactical disadvantage against their neighbors.
To strengthen their swords, smiths used the bones of their dead ancestors and animals, hoping to transfer the spirit into their blades.
They couldn't have known that in so doing, they were forging a rudimentary form of steel.“

Matt Davis (2019)

This article outlines the results of an EXARC funded 2019 Twinning project exploring the production and use of an Irish early medieval ard. In this, the project partners researched the evidence for early ploughs and ards, made bloomery iron, produced an ard share, and worked wood to form the frame of the ard. This paper also includes...

The bowl furnace has been a somewhat neglected topic in the early history of iron making, often overshadowed in experimental work by the shaft furnace. This assessment attempts to re-evaluate the position of the bowl furnace in early iron-making - firstly by looking at how it is regarded in scholarly literature, and secondly, through an experimental reconstruction programme...

A common theory is that copper smelting first appeared in the Near East in close connection with the early pottery industry. However, copper smelting may well have been discovered many times in history and at many places. Our hypothesis is that copper smelting could have been discovered when the copper-bearing mineral malachite, accidentally or intentionally, was present in lime-burning kilns...

Interpreting the cultural influences of Cyprus in antiquity has posed an issue, depending on one’s point of view or the different conclusions reached. Until the 1970s, in large part due to the extensive excavations along the northern coast of Cyprus, it seemed reasonable to recognise a plethora of Aegean traits in the island culture. Every element of the Cypriot Bronze Age was analysed and interpreted in...

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.

The article is focused on the creation of a protocol for the analytical characterization of fire-setting in different types of rock. A set of experiments of heating and cooling have been carried out on different kind of rocks under various conditions and durations in order to record changes in the structures and composition of the samples. This study was set to support the solution of issues in the case of...