May I just add to reinforce Nigel Seeley's comments that the use of hematite as a natural stone and the carving of such gray shining stones into objects is well attested in the Chalcolithic culture of Israel and Jordan (5th-4th Millennium BC) when mace heads were carved and polished from natural hematite and were stored or deposited with metal objects.
Sariel.
>>> [log in to unmask] 05/02/00 11:27am >>>
The discovery of objects made from magnetite (or for that matter
haematite, they are both naturally occurring iron oxide minerals) is not
evidence for the use of iron in the context concerned. Metallic iron
corrodes to a mixture of hydrated iron oxides (i.e. rust - magnetite and
haematite are not hydrated), and although magnetite may be formed as a
small component of the corrosion products of iron in certain
circumstances, it is never in the massive form exhibited by the naturally
occurring mineral. (Pyrite is an iron sulphide, unstable under normal
burial conditions, although occasionally formed in small quantities during
the corrosion of iron in an anaerobic environment.) The objects you
describe were worked from pieces of magnetite in exactly the same
way that other stone artifacts were made.
Nigel Seeley.
>>> "Doug Weller" <[log in to unmask]> 1/May/2000
08:48pm >>>
Can anyone help me with it? In particular, the last paragraph. I thought
iron oxide was iron pyrite? And is that really what would happen to iron
left in a humid environment? He seems to be claiming that rust is iron
oxide, but conical lumps of rust?
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