11-29-2007, 02:05 PM
Quote:Endre, I think it's another report not yet published?
I know; but it's been over 20 months since he posted and there's been no new information. Mike's post is rather unspesific, after all - it's not entirely clear what Sims is trying to say from what Mike writes - has he reconstructed and then case-hardened iron scales from decarburized pig/cast iron as leftovers from the bloomery process? Is Sims saying the roman iron foundries were producing liquid pig iron wholescale and then decarburizing it later? The last would be a revolutionary discovery, and would beggar the question why all we have archaeologically (quite a lot) of imperial roman ironmaking remnants is of bloomery production; which is mainly solid-state (with some liquid byproducts, see above) - I don't think I know any metallurgist that would dare to make that claim just from the objects themselves.
There are some finds of grey cast iron remnants at some roman and romano-british bloomery sites in britain; Craddock and Lang wrote a 2005 article about it but two of the finds (two cast iron figures) were dismissed as forgeries; it cannot, of course, be entirely ruled out that there was some experimentation on smelting iron. But I believe that work will have to include more digging at such sites; a furnace capable of reaching the temperatures needed will leave a lot of traces. It would be great fun if it eventually was authenticated - another nail in the coffin of the theory of a technological break between late roman and medieval europe.
I'm just not very optimistic. There are a number of methodological problems with the analysis of premodern steels and irons, spesifically the fact that they tend to be extremely heterogenous and that simultaneously, most analysis is conducted on a very small number of samples, and often (as in the case of Williams' mammoth book and the Fulford article a very small part of each sample).
It'll be interesting. Hasn't anyone written any notes at the ROMEC Mike talks about? Fulford et.al's article from 2003 and Sims book from 2004 is so far all we have to go by right now.
