methods & techniques

Background: The State of an Art?

Over the last three decades, bloomery iron smelting has moved from the largely theoretical to the practical. Although there were certainly earlier attempts via experimental process to build workable furnaces, most of these attempts were basically unsuccessful, at least in terms of actual iron production. Early researchers too often undertook (or at least only formally reported on) limited test series (one or two attempts) and many concentrated far too much on slag, not on the production of metallic iron itself.

Introduction

The vertical monolithic olive mill of the type of mola olearia which, like the Roman trapetum, first appeared during the Hellenistic era and spread all over the Graeco-Roman Mediterranean, surviving until the 20th century 1 .

Introduction

The site of Hepojarvi is located upon the northern coast of Lake Hepojarvi (See Figure 1). 

The experimental work directly related to the archaeological evidence turned out to be essential to the investigation, but much of it was too technical for the original publication. Experimental archaeology is its proper context, and I presented the posters this article is based on at the EXARC conference in Leiden in April 2017 (Kruseman, 2017a) and at the KEME symposium in Copenhagen in August 2017 (Kruseman 2017b). Thank you to the organizers and participants!