I was surprised to see so many studies on metallurgy when I was a foundryman in
the early 70s we never had scholars in the foundry.
Doing more than reading I was following the natural evolution to making iron
until the bosses son thought I was getting too smart and putting his leasure
time at risk.
One thing I'm sure of is the first step in making a metal object is shaping soft
metal by hammering.Gold as an example get enough flake or nuggets pound it with
a rock impurites will emerge as they do remove them which gives you a uniformed
metal and a secondary metal (silver in most cases) to work later.The next
progression of pounding gold is to make a bowl.
I'm serious the first objects were bowls,now you could carry water.
Tin being soft and unfortuatly lead again used for pounding bowls tin later used
with copper and lead lost favor for food containers (many times up to the early
1900s) I've imagined the first bowls were fashioned by pounding soft metal over
a rock and when man took a break from pounding metal woman came in and thought
that think would be usful to carry water.
Iron rusts so to make it stronger carbon was added,carbon in the form of charred
animal bones if the bones are charred slowly in an oven with a very limited
supply of O2 they char right through then added to iron starts giving graded
iron up to G class iron depending on amount of carbon and source.
A friend on the Six Nations Reservation in Ontario,Canada was doing copper work
he took me to the guy that taught him and he was hammering copper he'd collected
from his travels not previously used copper but virgin ore and under constant
pounding he removed metal that wasn't copper as it appeared,he was completeing
an object but pounding it and turning bringing up the edges until he had a nice
bowl.He told me it was a very usful object you could carry stuff in it like
water.
Had he continued to bring up the edges he'd have a jug the anvil would need to
be small enough to fit inside the neck this showed me the limitations of early
metal work,the meathod he used was used for thousands of years.
In all fareness the foundry I worked in wasn't close to any Univesity but I
still wonder how many students not of Metallurgy because they did visit us but
studies looking at Metallurgy as an interest not a profession have actually
poured molten metal into a mould.

                                                                                \
                                    Andy



--- On Sun, 10/5/08, Isabelle <tanithastarte@...> wrote:
From: Isabelle <tanithastarte@...>
Subject: [Archaeology] Re:metallurgy)
To: archaeology2@yahoogroups.com
Received: Sunday, October 5, 2008, 4:01 PM











Oh goodness, this is more than I hoped for... thank you so much for

this. Good thing I'm spending a large portion of my day in the library

tomorrow:-)



Thanks a lot.



>

> Hi Isabelle,

>

> Since I'm not really into metallurgy, I asked my colleague Aren

Maeir, director of the Tell es-Safi/Gath dig. Here's the list he gave me:

>


























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