Thank you for your comments and the note on Dave Killick's review of Jill
Juleff's work, which I haven't seen. However I read and much appreciated Jill's
original paper in Nature, to the extent of using her work as an example in
analyzing the operation of wind furnaces in my book "The Mastery and Uses of
Fire in Antquity" (appendix 3). There is of course no difficulty in producing
high carbon iron in a bloomery-style furnace and at a temperature of 1440 C,
carbon contents from above about one percent to the two-plus percent of cast
irons will be molten. They may or may not contain some slag when solidified,
depending on their handling. As is well known the Japanese Tatara furnace for
sword quality steel made high and low carbon iron at the same time, and
Japanese swords often contain slag stringers.
                                            Ned.

Anandalal Nanayakkara wrote:

> Hi Ned,
>
> I am an amateur in this field and am following the discussion since this is
> an enormously learning experience for me.  THank you for your comments on
> the subject of steel from Sri Lanka.  The work by Gill Juleff and others
> are infact on the basis that it was crucible steel (Wootz??) that was
> produced at the Samanalawewa sites from Sri Lanka.
>
> I am giving below a review of Gill Juleffs book Early Iron and Steel in Sri
> Lanka by David J Killick, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology,
> University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA.  This review is obtained from the
> following site.
>
> http://users.ox.ac.uk/~salter/arch-metals/met-review.htm
>
> Hope this can stimulate further discussion.
>
> Anan.
>
> 1367
> David Killick on Gillian Juleff's "Early Iron and Steel in Sri Lanka"
> (Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1998 [ISBN 3-8053-2512-6].
> This is a weighty large format tome (422 pp), beautifully produced with
> many monochrome and full-colour photographs.
>
> Although I have been following this project closely, I am still blown away
> by the quality of this volume and would urge anyone at all interested in
> archaeometallurgy to read it closely. I think that it is particularly
> notable for its exemplary integration of field survey, excavation,
> documentary and oral history, experimental archaeology and archaeometry.
>
> The volume describes the discovery, during survey of a valley to be flooded
> by construction of a large dam, of two features of interest. The first was
> the site of the crucible steel production famously described by
> Coomaraswamy in 1904. Juleff found that the descendants of those
> steelworkers still possessed some blooms, crucibles and ingots of crucible
> steel, and an excellent metallographic study of these by Michael Wayman is
> included here as an appendix. The second feature was the discovery of an
> entirely new type of iron-smelting furnace. As reconstructed by Juleff (and
> the data presented here allow no doubt as to the accuracy of her
> reconstruction) these were low subrectangular structures, 1.5 - 2 m in
> length, 0.4-0.8 m wide and (particularly suprising) only 0.5 m high. Large
> numbers of these were found, invariably placed near the crest of
> west-facing hills, with the front long wall, bearing a single line of up to
> a dozen tuyeres, facing downslope. Juleff argued that these were wind
> powered furnaces utilizing the force of th seasonal monsoon (July to
> September), which (as she shows in an innovative chapter packed with
> wind-velocity measurements) achieve sustained wind speeds of 40 km/h, with
> periodic peaks up to 60 km/h.
>
> Since Juleff was not an archaeometallurgist (at least not yet!) and there
> was no precedent for the technology that she proposed, her reconstruction
> encountered intense scepticism from the archaeometalurgical community. She
> countered this in the most effective way - by building full-scale replicas
> and smelting iron in them successfully on four separate occasions, using
> only the force of the monsoon wind. There can be no doubt that she is
> correct and that the Sri Lankan furnaces, for which available dates run
> from the seventh through the eleventh centuries AD, are a significant new
> chapter in the history of metallurgy. Mathematical modelling of the
> windflow patterns by David Wilson, an aeronautical engineer, explains why
> these furnaces work. A complex pattern of boundary layer separation occurs
> where the pasees over the lip of the front walls, producing a low pressure
> zone that draws air in through the tuyeres. This is NOT a natural draft
> furnace - Wilson's calculations suggest that the pressure drop achieved in
> these 0.5 m furnaces is equivalent to that in natural draft furnaces 3 to 6
> m tall.
>
> This is the kind of publication that sets new standards for an entire
> field. The quality of the fieldwork is very high, it is superbly
> documented, and it is all woven into a complex and extremely coherent
> argument. Furthermore, unlike much contemporary archaeometallurgy (and I am
> thinking here particularly of European and Latin American
> archaeometallurgy) this study stands out for its wide-ranging use of
> comparative material - African, European, Near Eastern, Indian and
> Japanese. In summary, this is about as good as it gets in our field.
>
> ----------------------
> David J Killick
> Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology
> University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA
>
> >It is quite possible that some Damascus swords were made from Sri Lankan
> steel,
> >but they would not have been of top quality. The two essentials of
> suitable steel
> >are freedom from slag inclusions, and high carbon content in the order of
> 1.5 to
> >1.8 percent. The former requires a crucible steel such as Wootz which was
> normaly
> >used, and  not a bloomery steel.
> >                                             Ned.
> >