Early Iron in Europe – an introduction and overview Thilo Rehren, Brigitte Cech The last decade has seen a plethora of archaeometallurgical conferences, some as periodical meetings with a clear geographical focus such as BUMA (Beginnings of the Use of Metals and Alloys) which specialises on Asian and circum-Paciic metallurgy, Anatolian Metals, or Archaeometallurgy in Europe, others as ad hoc events such as Metallurgy – a touchstone for cross-cultural interaction (2005, in honour of Paul Craddock at the British Museum), or as sub-sections of the biannual International Symposium on Archaeometry. Was there, then, room and need for yet another archaeometallurgical conference? In our view, yes. A close assessment of the subject coverage of most major archaeometrical or archaeometallurgical conferences revealed a strong bias towards copper and its alloys, and the noble metals. Iron, in contrast, was much less covered, despite the undoubted and overwhelming economic importance of this metal compared to base metals. The 2005 conference in London had just 15% of its papers devoted to iron, and even the 2006 BUMA conference in Beijing had only 30% iron papers, despite the particular signiicance of this metal in Chinese early metallurgy. This pattern is also repeated in the published literature (Rehren and Pernicka 2008: 244), suggesting a major re-set of the record was overdue. Against this backdrop, Brigitte Cech developed the concept for the Hüttenberg Conference Early Iron in Europe - Prehistoric and Roman Iron Production, focussing on European early iron production, a ield of study where tremendous progress was being made but which did not enjoy the visibility it deserved. Hüttenberg, a small village in the mountains of southern Austria seemed the ideal place for this conference. It was the centre of the production of the famous ferrum Noricum, the Noric steel mentioned in Greek and Roman literature. Archaeological excavations at the site Semlach/Eisner revealed the remains of largescale Roman iron production over a period of at least four centuries. Later iron ore mining and smelting in the region continued well into the 20th century AD, making this a region of international importance for the technical heritage of iron. Interdisciplinary research into the Roman period started in 2003 and continued until 2010. For these reasons Hüttenberg seemed the perfect setting for a conference on early iron production in Europe. In September 2008, after careful planning and preparation, 102 delegates from ifteen different countries presented 52 oral papers and 34 In: B. Cech & Th. Rehren (eds) 2014. Early Iron in Europe. Instrumentum Monographies 50, 7-10. ISBN 978-2-35518-041-5 © The Authors. Fig. 1: The participants on a ieldtrip to the excavations at the site Semlach/Eisner. Fig. 2: Getting ready to enter the visitors’ mine at Knappenberg. posters, covering different aspects of iron production from the beginnings of iron technology to the Middle Ages. More important than the individual presentations were the informal but often highly speciic and professional discussions among the delegates, facilitated by the setting where everybody stayed within the village, and shared the full programme without distractions. The feedback received from the participants conirmed our impression that the meeting was a great success, and encouraged us to think about a more formal and lasting legacy that would do it justice. We therefore invited the participants to submit –7– Early Iron in Europe their manuscripts for publication in an edited volume, the one you hold in your hands right now. However, in order to keep our project manageable and thematically coherent, we decided to focus the book of proceedings on European iron production of the Late La Tène and the Roman period only, of course without prejudice against the importance of iron production elsewhere and at other times. Indeed, a parallel initiative by Jane Humphris and Xander Veldhuijzen resulted in a sister conference, the World of Iron which took place in London in February 2009 (Humphris and Rehren 2013), speciically excluding European iron metallurgy. Despite our restriction in time and space, a comprehensive coverage of the remit of this volume is certainly ambitious, and therefore bound to remain incomplete and unachievable. To see this, one only needs to look at the three operative words in its title in a little more critical detail, balancing it against the actual contents of the volume. The ‘early’ bit easily covers ifteen hundred years, if not more. As so often, the beginnings are invisible in the mist of time. When we inally begin to see iron being used, and preserved in the archaeological record, and excavated, then it is prudent to assume that it had been around already for a while. To stay clear of much of the ‘mist’ around the beginnings of iron use we set the base line for this volume at the La Tène period, very broadly the 5th century BC. Similarly unclear is the end of ‘early’. Even without Churchillian word plays about the Beginning of the End vs the End of the Beginning there ought to be some attempt to deine when the ‘early’ iron use ends, and when it becomes ‘middle’, and when ‘late’. In this volume, the cutoff runs broadly with the collapse of the western Roman Empire, consistent with the notion that after this we enter soon the Middle Ages, and are out of ‘early’. Sufice it to say though that this decline and fall of the Roman Empire is by no means a clear-cut affair either, and highly variable in its timing and impact on individual regions across Europe. Thus, even this seemingly well-deined hiatus is only broadly suitable as a chronological threshold, and becomes even less so when one looks at the evidence for continuity and disruption in some more detail. In any case, in this book we managed to keep the chronological range within a thousand years. Then, ‘iron’. This, of course, is a rather wide ield, too. Before one can even begin to make new contributions to this subject on an academic level one ought to enrol in a four-years engineering degree, followed by another few years of postgraduate study only to catch up with what knowledge and insight materials science has to offer around this one metal and its alloys. While archaeological iron may be somewhat simpler than the full gamut of modern iron and steel technology, it still offers three major types of iron: soft iron, carbon steel, and phosphoric iron. To this comes a dazzling multitude of working techniques, some more culturally embedded than others, but all important on a technological as well as culture-historical and even social level. It is this added complexity due to the wide cultural diversity inherent in a metal of such wide use and importance which makes the archaeometallurgy of iron so interesting. Geographically, the frame set up here is clear; it is covering more or less everything west of the Urals and north of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The actual coverage, though, is patchy and heavily biased towards western and northern Europe. This is unfortunate, as it therefore misses areas with very rich research traditions such as Poland and the Czech Republic, as well as less well studied areas (or at least less well published in western languages) such as the Balkans, Russia and the Black Sea littoral. Thus, we are missing out on drawing from the accumulated expertise and experience of scholarship in these areas, and in sharing the excitement of new research currently taking place there. What, then, remains as the positive contribution from this volume? The outcome The 22 papers assembled here give both an overview and ine detail. They are arranged in a broad geographical sweep across Europe and inishing with a few more technical and less geographically-focused papers. Taking Hüttenberg as the starting point, this sweep irst goes north with three papers on early iron in Germany, then on through the Netherlands into France, moving back south to Switzerland and into Italy. A second sweep starts in Great Britain and takes in Scandinavia as well, before the book then inishes with the technical papers on smithing wastes and the role of manganese oxide in bloomery iron smelting, bringing the circle to a full close back to Hüttenberg and the famous ferrum Noricum. Several things become immediately app.arent from these papers. By the La Tène period, iron is a ubiquitous metal, and its working is as common as pottery production and other utilitarian crafts such as wood working and agriculture. In fact, it is intimately linked with most of these other crafts, either through shared space and resources (the article of Irene Calliari et al. (pp. 197-202) provides a particularly intriguing example for this), or through providing indispensable tools that facilitate the productivity of the other crafts. By this time, iron working is literally nearly everywhere, as Sylvain Bauvais and Philippe Fluzin detail in their article (pp. 133-146) for late La Tène north-central France, and Vincent Serneels lays out for Roman Switzerland (pp. 161-172), with smithing evidence being excavated from nearly every agglomeration, settlement, villa or vicus. Iron smelting, in contrast, is wide-spread but not as omnipresent as smithing. The wealth of iron deposits across Europe, and the even greater abundance of occurrences of ore pockets suficient to sustain local production, resulted in iron becoming a truly ‘democratic’ metal as Childe (1942) put it – access was in the hands of the many, not controlled by trade networks and the privileges of the few who had access to copper and tin sources. Other than the capital-intensive indirect iron production with –8– Thilo Rehren, Brigitte Cech: Early Iron in Europe – an introduction and overview its need for large blast furnaces, much larger throughput and continuous operation, the bloomery furnace could be built by just a few people over a weekend, and operated only as and when needed. At the same time, production was easily up-scalable through semi-continuous operation and smelting in multiple units. The articles in this book provide ample evidence for this, be it through the systematic surveys for Germany (Guntram Gassmann and Andreas Schäfer pp. 33-42), Switzerland (Vincent Serneels pp. 161-172), northern Italy (Costanza Cucini and Marco Tizzoni pp.173-180) and southern Norway (Jan Henning Larsen and Bernt Rundberget pp. 231-248, Arne Espelund pp. 249-260), or through individual case studies showing the proliferation of countless medium-sized and smaller smelting sites, examples of which are given in the articles of Patrice de Rijk and Ineke Joosten pp. 65-80, Florian Sarreste pp. 81-92, Marie-Pierre Coustures et al. pp. 93116 and Eva Hjärthner-Holdar et al. pp. 261-276. Another growing observation is the presence of numerous large-scale production regions, such as in the Lahn-Dill area (Andreas Schäfer pp. 33-42), the Siegerland (Thomas Stöllner et al. pp. 43-64), Tuscany (Alessandro Corretti et al. pp. 181-196), Wales (Tim Young pp. 215-226) or the Weald (Jeremy Hodgkinson pp. 227-230), some of which were simply unknown until relatively recently, and yet contributed signiicant quantities of iron to their regional economies. Clearly, these were not exploited ad hoc or by small-scale smelters operating just for their own needs, but must have relied on a deep infrastructure to supply and manage labour, fuel, food and shelter, and access to markets or patrons who required large quantities of metal. Signiicantly, these large production sites are by no means necessarily linked to the Roman occupation and inluence, but emerge well before that (Peter Halkon pp. 203-214). Their existence must have played an important economic role for the development of Iron Age societies, including their inter-regional trade and wealth creation, as well as driving technical development to increased eficiencies. These would have provided a sound basis and skilled workforce on which the Romans then were able to build their own enterprises, often military-operated, even though they also developed their entirely new operations (Tim Young pp. 215-226). This interplay between ubiquitous iron working and less centralised but still widespread iron smelting offers interesting insights into the organisation of this craft, and raises the question where the purely consumer sites obtained their raw material. For this, the trade in iron ingots provides important clues as well as major challenges (Marianne Senn et al. pp. 147-160), while in other areas supp.ly regions can be reasonably assumed (for example the article by Costanza Cucini and Marco Tizzoni pp. 173180). Provenancing iron objects, through slag inclusions and their particular chemical make-up, is another ield that goes back a long way (Hedges and Salter 1979), but is making much progress recently. The article by MariePierre Coustures et al. (pp. 93-116) gives one such example where fortuitous geochemistry and cutting-edge trace element analysis led to a unique slag signature despite the utilisation of a range of different ores. Developing diachronic pictures for individual regions, and studying the macro-economic aspects of the early iron industry, are among the larger trends that emerge from looking at the work done over the last decade or two. Of course, there are more comprehensive syntheses of early European iron – Radomir Pleiner’s works (Pleiner 2000, 2006) leading among them, and this volume does not attempt to offer anything similar. Any such picture, however, can only gain from a broader data base, and here we see the contributions from this volume, providing new data from major current research. Yet another important aspect that became app.arent during the conference, and is evident in some of the contributions, is the need for standardised, or at least compatible, approaches of recording, analysing and interpreting the evidence. Only this will enable the drawing of larger pictures, but also to discern culturally relevant differences in technological practice, necessary for instance to identify the impact of Romanisation on an already-developed mature Iron Age industry, or indeed the post-Roman fragmentation of the economy. Historically, archaeometallurgy has its roots in many different disciplines. Metallurgy, geology, mineralogy, archaeology, history, ethnography all have made and continue to make very substantial contributions to it. To be able to beneit from the collective wisdom and expertise of these disciplines, to develop real synergies of interdisciplinary working requires developing a common language and common research goals, while allowing of course unique speciic foci and characteristic approaches. Here, the informal conference discussions mentioned above, in between talks, in the evenings and often late in the night played a crucial role, and we are glad to have a matching variety of approaches assembled here in a common volume. The beneit of using a common language is also evident when looking at the mother tongues of the authors. Less than ten percent of the authors have English as their native language, and yet, everybody was able to communicate effectively in this current lingua franca. The same holds true for the academic ‘languages’ of the different mother disciplines, and conferences such as this help developing archaeometallurgy into an academic discipline in its own right, with its own terminology, methods of research, shared agendas, and dedicated journals and conference proceedings. The critical mass of active researchers necessary for this is clearly there. Finally, a number of major themes emerge where future research is likely to make signiicant new contributions to the archaeometallurgy of iron. Characterising individual production regions by their chemical and isotopic signatures is one of them, quantifying metal production both on the single-site level and for entire regions another. The importance of macro-economic viewpoints has already been mentioned, and their potential contribution to Iron Age and Roman archaeology will only increase as we continue to expand the data base on which to operate. After all, iron was a major strategic metal, and building projects such –9– Early Iron in Europe as the limes and its associated infrastructure of military forts, civilian settlements and road networks required vast quantities of iron to complete – but the historical sources are surprisingly silent on much of this. We hope that this volume, collectively and through each individual paper, makes the case for the rich academic harvest to be had through studying iron production remains, be it through the microscope or at a continental scale. Acknowledgements We want to thank all the colleagues who submitted papers for this book, and the reviewers whose critical input played an essential part in its editing. The articles were submitted for publication in the autumn of 2011, and we sincerely apologise to the authors for the undue delay in inalising the project, due to a number of unforeseen circumstances. Raul Carstocea was instrumental in the English editing, while Karina Schwunk (German Mining Museum, Bochum) prepared the page layout; their work is gratefully acknowledged. Without the inancial contribution from IAMS and UCL Qatar this volume would not have been possible, and their support is much appreciated. We also wish to thank Rudolf Schratter, the mayor of Hüttenberg, for his help before and during the conference and for inviting us all to dinner on the irst evening. Josef Ofner, our host at the Musikzentrum, provided us with a wonderful conference venue. Last, but not least we want to thank the students from Vienna and London who were responsible for the smooth running of the conference and all the people of Hüttenberg who helped to make this meeting a success for the organisers as well as for the participants. Bibliography Childe, V.G., 1942, What happened in History, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hedges, R.E.M. and Salter, C.J., 1979, Source determination of iron currency bars through analysis of the slag inclusions, Archaeometry 21: 161–75. Humphris, J. and Rehren, Th. (eds.), 2013, The World of Iron, London: Archetype. Pleiner, R., 2000, Iron in archaeology: the European bloomery smelters, Archeologicky Ústav Avcr, Praha. Pleiner, R., 2006, Iron in Archaeology: Early European Blacksmiths, Archeologicky Ústav Avcr, Praha. Rehren, Th. and Pernicka, E., 2008, Coins, artefacts and isotopes: archaeometallurgy and archaeometry, Archaeometry 50: 232-48. Authors’ addresses Thilo Rehren, Brigitte Cech UCL Qatar PO Box 25256 Georgetown Building Hamad bin Khalifa University Doha Qatar e-mail: th.rehren@ucl.ac.uk e-mail: b.cech@gmx.at – 10 –