If I can add some of my own experiences of experimental smelting and learning
from past practitioners in Sri Lanka. I am in complete agreement with
Killick, our attempts at smelting, whatever their success, can only be
experiments unless we have the good fortune to learn from or work with people
who have regularly smelted in the past. In the course of fieldwork in Sri
Lanka I was lucky enough to talk to a dwindling group of people, all now in
their 80's (if they know their age) who witnessed or were involved in
traditional bloomery smelting. The range and nature of their memories was
fascinating. At one end of the scale were people who, as children, had hung
around operational furnaces, as a part of every-day village life. They could
describe the size, shape and external appearance of the furnace. They knew it
was charged with lots of charcoal and that it produced rough lumps of iron.
They could also describe the general design of the distinctive foot bellows,
but their accounts of the actual process varied wildly and were largely based
on popular myth.
Then there were those who were members of traditional smelter caste families
who had participated in smelting operations. Most of these people had seen
smelting die out in their parents' lifetimes, when they were children or
young adults. As children, they had been bellows fodder and could conjure up
the design and operation of the bellows to the minutest detail, including
irritating, idiosyncratic design faults. But, because the bellows was
separated from the furnace by a high, protective, wattle and daub wall, they
never got to see what happened at the furnace end of things and their
descriptions of the smelting process were as variable as those of people who
had wandered past furnaces on their way to and from their paddy fields. Had
traditional smelting survived a little longer, these youngsters would have
graduated to 'front of house' operations and we would perhaps today know a
little more.
The only person I did meet and talk to who had actually smelted iron herself
on a regular basis, as a young woman with her husband, is sadly now deceased.
Augustina could conjure up in words and hand actions, the entire process from
start to finish. She knew the shape of the inside of the furnace, she knew
how a smelt went on through the night and how you felt when the bloom was
extracted in the morning. She knew what tools to use and how to handle them,
where to collect ore and how to sort and prepare it. This she did for me,
sorting through a bucketload of material I'd collected, selecting around half
as good for smelting. The few remaining people like Augustina are our only
direct links with what really happened. Her son could only repeat what his
parents had told him, without any of the insight or understanding that his
mother had. Killick's 30 year, or one generation, survival of knowledge holds
true for Sri lanka, after that we enter the realms of experimentation.
The same goes for bloom-smithing and traditional blacksmithing - but that's
another story.
Gill Juleff
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