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Dear All,

Thank you for your very helpful responses. I had a look at the papers from Patrice and Peter Crew, and both seem to suggest that flake hammerscale is more likely to occur in the later stages of the bloomsmithing process, which indeed makes sense to me now. In our case, spheroidal hammerscale predominates in all samples rather clearly, but always occurs together with some flake hammerscale. Of course, I agree with Tim's word of caution, and we certainly can't pretend our hammerscale samples are representative of the whole site ; however, I guess this assemblage would fit the assumption that the blooms have been consolidated to more or less compact billets directly at the smelting site...

Kind regards,

Sébastien
Le 10.12.2013 08:29, Patrice Rijk a écrit :

Dear Sébastien,

 

Some 20 years ago I carried out a bloom smithing experiment in Lejre. During this experiment I collected all slag. The experiment showed that spheroidal hammerscale and larger slag pieces were mainly formed during the first bloom smithing stages whereas flakes formed when the iron was already (partly) consolidated. In general, all types of hammerscale can be found during all stages of bloom smithing. It is the ratio between the types of hammerscale that allows to differentiate between the different stages of bloom smithing, i.e. between working bloom and consolidated bloom. You can find the article (in German) on academia.

 

Kind regards,

Patrice de Rijk

 

Dr. P.T.A. (Patrice) de Rijk

ArcheoMedia BV

Essebaan 7

2908 LJ Capelle aan den IJssel

Netherlands

 

Tel.: +31 (0)10-2582360

Fax:  +31 (0)10-2582325

 

 


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Département de Géosciences
Chemin du Musée 6
Université de Fribourg
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