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Originally Posted by Tim Simmons

Good points Fearn. I think the idea of oxygenating a fire is not hard to grasp even if an area is not known for ceramic production. One just has to think of the low fired ceramic wares from Africa, often fired on an open fire or smouldering dung fire. Yet we see African smelting of iron from a hole in the ground, the fire oxygenated from simple bag bellows. I would imagine simple smelting sites like these would present problems for archaeologists to differentiate from domestic hreaths? The picture is from "Kwakiul Art, Audrey Hawthorn, University of Washington Press. Perhaps inspired by European design or not? but I cannot believe that people who make such splendid articulated masks would have problems arriving at a form of bellows.

Hi Tim,

I agree that once you point out the problem and solution, they would be fully capable of understanding. However, there are a bunch of lessons that you have to learn to work iron, including:

1. Rocks melt/ become flexible with heat. They knew that heat-treating chert and other stones made them more workable for knapping, but the idea that things become more flexible with heat is more applicable to wood than stone.
2. That it's useful to make super-hot fires. This is the pottery lesson.
3. That charcoal is useful for making super-hot fires.
4. That copper can be melted in super-hot fires.
5. That bellows, blow-tubes, or other gizmos help make fires hotter--I'm sure they knew about blowing on flames, but that sustained air flow thing is tricky.
6. That furnaces help make really hot fires.
7. (The trickier part) that if you heat up ocher or other iron ore in a charcoal furnace with a draft, you get this stuff that, if you pound it repeatedly under heat in the proper fashion, turns out to be really useful--iron.

That's a lot to learn from scratch. I think it was easier in Eurasia and Africa because there was so much trade in ideas going around that one tribe didn't have to make all of the discoveries in order to make iron. They could borrow or steal from others.

Now, assuming you don't know about iron or even melting and molding copper. How do you know that there's something called iron that's out there and worth having, let alone discover all those steps and put them together? However, once you've seen iron and steel, it's not hard to learn how to make it.

F