![]() By the 1800s, increases demand for iron ore to fuel the industrial revolution had made larger underground iron mines more common. Via the Smithsonian, a painting of an iron mine by Homer Dodge Martin (c. ![]() Throughout all of this, we are going to look not only at the processes by which these objects were produced, but also the people who did that production. As with the farming posts, there are likely to be some addendum (at least one, on Wootz steel, for sure). And finally in the last week, we’ll ask what one might do if they wanted steel instead of iron. The week after that we’ll look at the basic principles behind forging. ![]() Next week we’ll take a look at ore processing, smelting in more detail, along with the pressing issue of fuel. So this first post is going to focus on mining. We are going to have to start over, from the beginning. The popular depiction is so consistently wrong that it doesn’t really even provide a firm basis for correction. Iron is treated as rare when it is common, melted in societies that almost certainly lack the furnaces to do so swords are cast when they should be forged, quenched in ways that would ruin them and the work of the iron-worker is represented as a solitary activity when every stage of iron-working, when done at any kind of scale, was a team job (many modern traditional blacksmiths work alone, often as a hobby ancient smiths generally did not). If the problem with farmers is that the popular understanding of the past (either historical or fantastical) renders them effectively invisible – as indeed, it tends to render most ancient forms of production invisible – iron-working is tremendously visible, but in a series of motifs that are almost completely wrong. Iron production is a unique topic in one key way. If you are here wondering how you go from iron-bearing rocks to a sword, these posts will tell you, but they will equally get you from those same rocks to a nail, or a workman’s hammer, or a sawblade, or a pot, or a decorative iron spiral, or a belt-buckle, or any other of a multitude of things that might be produced in iron. And I want to stress that broad framing: iron was made into more things than just swords (although swords are cool). As with our series on farming, we are going to follow the train of iron production from the mine to a finished object, be that a tool, a piece of armor, a simple nail, a weapon or some other object. This week we are starting a four-part look ( I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) at pre-modern iron and steel production.
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