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 –