Month: February 2018

Forging Ahead!

Exciting times! Tomorrow I get on a train and head across Europe. I’ll start out in Modena and change trains in Milan, then Zurich. When I get to Berlin I’ll meet up with friends and head on to Brandenburg for the Kunst- und Handwerkstechniken der Bronzezeit (Art and Craftwork of the Bronze Age) at the Landesmuseum in Brandenburg. Then on the 14th I fly to Moscow for the Times and Epochs Festival, where I’ll be demonstrating Bronze Age metalworking. Is that enough? No… In September I’ll be going to Cyprus, the land of copper, to do even more bronze casting at the Vounous Symposium. This is a great honour since Cyprus was the source for Aegean copper. I will be seeing and working in one of the earliest areas where the craft of bronze working began.

I’ll be posting as often as I can and there will be lots of photos and pages written about the events. Up to date reports will be posted to my Patreon page.

 

Now we’re Cooking with Gas! How experimental archaeology challenges modern assumptions about metal recycling.

New article available through EXARC. See the link below for the full article

It is accepted knowledge that when re-melting alloys, some of the metal with a lower melting temperature is lost through oxidation, and more metal must be added in order to maintain the desired alloy proportions. In order to understand the changes in alloy content when recycling using Bronze Age technology, experiments were undertaken by the author and others, using a charcoal furnace. These experiments included recycling bronze to quantify the loss of tin, and how alloys were affected by co-melting metals. The results were then compared to modern metallurgical practices using electric and gas furnaces. The initial results were presented at the Historical Metallurgy Society’s Research in Progress Conference in November of 2009. However, this paper includes further experiments that build on the earlier work. The conclusions indicate that knowledge of earlier practices was lost with the advance of technology, and that broad assumptions cannot be made about earlier technological practice based on work done with modern equipment.

Read the full article here