After a few days away from the keyboard, I'd like to comment a
little, if belatedly, on the Sauder & Williams bloomery.
Firstly, on the "accuracy" of their reconstruction; on their web page
they clearly state that they were inspired, in part at least, by the
bloomery industry in their own county. The "evolved" bloomeries of
North America, don't seem to me to be much better understood
than their predecessors of 2000 years before. Understanding how
refractory-lined bloomeries with preheated air and water cooled
tuyeres perform is a useful aim in itself (and *is* archaeology!). OK -
I realise that their bloomery isn't an exact copy of one of these
beasts either, but nonetheless... Some of the discussion has
perhaps been a little Eurocentric (yes, I know its Mailbase...).
Secondly, on experimentation in general; scientific experiments
don't need to reproduce the complete suite of "real world"
conditions. If that were the case, what would ever be the point of
studying a reaction in a test-tube? Useful evidence can be gained
by pushing limits and by making observations under conditions not
occurring in the "real world". As long as the limitations of the data
are understood, such evidence can be vital. I have found some of
Skip & Lee's observations to be very interesting - they may or may
not be representative of processes which actually happened in the
bloomeries of the period I'm trying to recreate - but they provide
valuable information on the underlying mechanisms.
Peter Crew has provided some extremely important evidence for
the operation of small non-tapping clay furnaces, and incresingly
for other types too. Lee & Skip have provided some interesting
evidence for the operation of furnaces at the other end of
technological scale. We should be interested in producing a fusion
of such datasets to aid our understanding of the mechanisms and
ancient operating conditions of bloomery furnaces, instead of rather
fruitless argument over which approach is more technically
accurate. The experimental archaeology of the bloomery process
should not be confused with attempting to recreate a particular
development of that process - both recreations and "non real-world"
experiments have a role in experiments. What is needed is a cool
evaluation of what each tells us.
As a final comment, constructing a working bloomery does not tell
us how people worked in the past, but making any bloomery stop
working does tell us how they didn't!
Tim
Dr Tim Young
Email: [log in to unmask]
Web: http://www.geoarch.demon.co.uk/
Phone: 029 2074 7480
Fax: 08700 547366
Mobile: 07802 413704
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