Exploring the impact of iron production on forest and woodland resources: estimating fuel consumption from slag

Louise Iles

9 citations0/0 files storedSTAR Science & Technology of Archaeological Research

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Metallurgy and Cultural Artifacts Archaeology and ancient environmental studies Cultural Heritage Materials Analysis

Abstract

Reconstructing past anthropogenic influences on forest and woodland resources is an important tool to understand the development of present patterns of land use, and their long-term impacts. Past metallurgical activity undoubtedly consumed significant charcoal, exploiting forest resources for fuel at various stages of metal extraction and processing. This study aimed to quantify this fuel consumption from archaeometallurgical remains, with North Pare as a case study – a prominent centre of precolonial iron production activity in north Tanzania, and a mountainous region subject to considerable erosion processes attributed to changes in forest cover. Archaeometallurgical remains from Pare were examined with bulk chemical analysis, optical microscopy and elemental analysis to reconstruct Pare’s past iron production technologies. The data was interrogated to distinguish the contribution of the fuel ash to the smelting system, with implications for our understanding of past forest degradation processes in relation to metallurgy, reducing reliance on potentially problematic analogy.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.

References

2000Iron in Archaeology: The European Bloomery Smelters 1986African Iron Working: Ancient and Traditional 1981Iron is iron 'til it is rust: Trade and Ecology in the Decline of West African Iron-Smelting 1987Science and magic in African technology: traditional iron smelting in Malawi 1993Pre-Industrial Iron: Its Technology and Ethnology 1989Between bloomery and blast furnace: Mafa iron-smelting technology in North Cameroon 2005GLASS BY DESIGN? RAW MATERIALS, RECIPES AND COMPOSITIONAL DATA*2014Smelting of magnetite and magnetite–ilmenite iron ores in the northern Lowveld, South Africa, ca. 1000 CE to ca. 1880 CE

Cited by

2020The furnace and the goat—A spatio-temporal model of the fuelwood requirement for iron metallurgy on Elba Island, 4th century BCE to 2nd century ce 2022Twentieth-century Bena iron production in the Njombe district of Tanzania 2023Prehistoric Iron Bloomery Debris on a Small Island in Lake Aisetas (Eastern Lithuania)2025Characterization of Tuyères from Lekie Division, Centre Cameroon (West Central Africa): raw materials and ironworking processes

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.