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Forges, fieldwork, and frying pans - Ep 3
327 Plays2 years ago
The trowel is generally considered to be the essential piece in any archaeologist's toolkit, but how long have trowels been around and what kinds of trowels can you use in excavations? In this episode, Matilda chats with professional archaeologist and blacksmith Dr Zechariah Jinks-Fredrick about why we choose the tools that we do, but also the development of metal tools and metalworking in the past. What's the difference between a cow bone and a trowel? Very little apparently...
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. You're listening to Tea Break Time Travel, where every month we look at a different archaeological object and take you on a journey into their past.
Host's Introduction and Guest Reveal
00:00:20
Speaker
Hi, and welcome to this third time-traveling expedition, aka episode of Tea Break Time Travel. I'm your host, Matilda Ziebrecht, and today I am drinking a lovely rhubarb tea. I seem to be drinking fruity teas all the time.
00:00:36
Speaker
You're listening to Tea Break Time Travel, where every month we look at a different archaeological object and take you on a journey into their past. I'm your host, Matilda Ziebrecht, and today I am savoring a fruity rhubarb tea. And joining me on my tea break today is Zachariah... Zink... Friedrich, I said it wrong, even though we just did it, but it's fine, I'll continue. What are you drinking today, Zach?
00:00:55
Speaker
I'm just having some coffee, thank you. Coffee. Are you more a coffee man than a tea person?
Zachariah's Beverage Preferences
00:01:00
Speaker
Coffee for the mornings, tea for the afternoons. For coffee it's usually a Sumatra roast, dark roast. For tea it's usually Iron Goddess of Mercy. Iron Goddess of Mercy? That sounds like an amazing... What's the flavour of that? It's the type of oolong that comes from southern China. It's
00:01:20
Speaker
also known as Ikuan Yin, which is just a really healthy antioxidant green tea.
00:01:28
Speaker
Gosh, you know your teas? Wow, I feel like a fraud here, charlatan just drinking my rhubarb tea. I have to say, I got like, actually the main reason I got into teas was I started drinking all these different fruity and herbal and different sort of ones. Like I got a orange and carrot one at some point. I was like, I didn't even know tea could be like this. I assumed it always had to be these. Yeah, these special teas, but anyway, but good. Okay. Nice. And the coffee, black coffee, coffee with milk, coffee with sugar.
00:01:56
Speaker
Coffee with double cream. Me even. Ah, nice, nice, nice, nice. And do you often savour an Irish coffee as well? I do sometimes here, on the weekends especially. Nice, nice. Maybe not, I guess we're recording this in the morning, so I would maybe judge you slightly if you were drinking an Irish coffee at this point. Anyway,
Zachariah's Journey to Archaeology
00:02:16
Speaker
good. So, Zach, you are an archaeologist as well as being a blacksmith. How did you get into archaeology?
00:02:23
Speaker
I got into archaeology, I suppose, with my undergraduate degree. I started in anthropology and history and just found that I enjoyed archaeology more. It was just one of those things that I was transitioned into. I started in criminal justice. I don't know, I just found
00:02:43
Speaker
like I was going to get too stuck in that. And it didn't, I wasn't happy with where I was living. I wanted to travel the world more and just have more control over my life. So I decided that archaeology was a good way to do that. Yeah, so that's kind of it. And then with my background previously with metalworking and just my own interest in it, that kind of brought me into archaeo metallurgy, which is what my passion is. So
00:03:08
Speaker
Yeah, that's amazing. Sorry, you just threw that out of the blue there like criminal justice. So I guess you're you weren't necessarily one of these. I mean, I think a lot of archaeologists, when you say how did you become interested in archaeology, they always say, Oh, since I was born, I've wanted to dig in the ground and everything. So that wasn't you.
00:03:26
Speaker
That wasn't me, no. It was just, it was an elective where I was doing my criminal justice degree and I took it. It was world archaeology.
Matilda's Path to Archaeology
00:03:34
Speaker
I needed to make an elective up and it sounded good and I really enjoyed it and it just felt like
00:03:41
Speaker
That's more what I should do. Yeah. That's really funny. That was exactly the same with me, actually. I was doing, I think, well, I started doing film and then I changed to Spanish at some point. I was doing a Spanish degree. And then my friend was doing an archaeology degree. And the course she was doing was all about, like, you know, the origins of humans and all of that kind of thing. And I've always been really interested in human evolution and all of that kind of things. And I was like,
Blacksmithing and Metalwork Techniques
00:04:03
Speaker
why am I not doing this? So I did it as an elective in the next semester and loved it and changed my degree and had to catch up and do all of those things.
00:04:11
Speaker
It's nice to find a fellow person who discovered it later in life, shall we say. Yes, I agree. And so you mentioned that you were doing blacksmithing already before.
00:04:21
Speaker
Yeah, it would. My father has always been interested in it. And he never really cooked too much himself. But we were always going to like, events and things like that, whether it was farriers or blacksmiths making things. And he was trained originally as a welder. So he had a good knowledge already of metalworking. And we used to build things together in the shop and the garage. And for me, it was just kind of a seem like a natural progression to kind of
00:04:49
Speaker
pursue that interest alongside him when I was a teenager. I started doing more things and going to more kind of events. When I was 14, I worked with a farrier for a summer. And I learned a lot from him. And that was really quite nice as well. But I decided I hate making horseshoes. So I was like, I don't want to be a farrier. That's for sure.
00:05:10
Speaker
Okay. And so, because I guess the sort of welding and the modern blacksmithing techniques, are they still quite different to pass with? I mean, I guess we'll get into this later, but like just a quick intro, maybe? A quick intro. Yeah, a quick intro would be, depends on what you're talking about,
00:05:27
Speaker
Okay. There's a lot of differences and there's a lot of similarities. So it's really coming down to what you're manufacturing. Okay. So you were able to use that experience that you had in the past with the welding and the more sort of modern metalworking techniques, excuse me, to look then at more past techniques or sort of past activities. That's really cool. That's a really nice thing.
00:05:49
Speaker
Quick question before we continue.
Historical Periods and Reenactments
00:05:51
Speaker
If you could then travel back in time, this is an interesting one for you especially because you haven't always been interested in archaeology and history necessarily before uni, where would you go if you could travel back in time and why? Well, I think I'd probably travel back to the early medieval period or the Iron Age. I was always, from the time I was probably about, I don't know,
00:06:10
Speaker
four years old, I was always obsessed with, you know, kind of the Crusades and the Dark Ages and the Vikings. I just always loved that period of history so much. So I think I'll probably go back to that time, kind of think I do that still with my own reenactment stuff when I go to my different events that I do. But to be honest, I mean, it just feels like your cosplay as an adult, which is a bit scientific experiment.
00:06:40
Speaker
I'm also a big fan of experimental archaeology and reenactment, and I always think, no, no, no, this is scientific. It's my work. It's not me having fun.
The 1808 Archaeological Site of Bush Barrow
00:06:50
Speaker
Well, we'll get into more of that in a bit, but thank you very much for joining me on my tea break today. And before we look at today's object, which you can all probably guess what that might be.
00:06:59
Speaker
Let's first journey back a few hundred years to 1808 and the site of Bush Barrow in Normanton Downs. So the sun is starting to set over the grassy fields you can picture the scene, swathers of bushes and trees, the mounds of various barrows faintly visible in the surrounding dusk, a crisscross of trenches cuts into the field and standing over the site is William Cunningham, who's often considered the father of modern archaeological excavation.
00:07:23
Speaker
His very curly hair, according to the pictures I found, blows across his face with its very prominent nose, bushy eyebrows, and he bends down and picks up a tool that one of the diggers had forgotten to pack away. It's a little handheld tool with a triangular-shaped blade, sort of triangular diamond-shaped blade, and a very rough wooden handle, very popular with the diggers as it's less unwieldy than a spade but still allows the efficient removal of soil around more delicate finds.
00:07:47
Speaker
A report from this Bush Barrow site is actually the first written record that we have of the use of an archaeologist's trowel, which is the kind of theme of this episode today. So we'll get into the details soon, but first I started doing this thing where I look at the most asked questions on the internet, inspired by the
00:08:05
Speaker
autocomplete google interview that they have sometimes. So, courtesy of Google search, I typed in archaeologist trial and saw what came up. There weren't too many different things, but the first one was, isn't archaeologist trial safe? What would you say to that, Zach?
00:08:21
Speaker
I guess I don't quite understand what they're saying. Is it safe from being stolen? Or is it safe to use? I mean, it is pointy. It's kind of like a spearhead. I've always thought that basically a trowel is a spearhead. So I'm not quite sure what they're getting at there. I guess you could say, because I suppose most archaeology trowels are blunt, right? Like they're not completely sharp? Or do you have some that are sharp?
00:08:51
Speaker
Oh, that's an entire school of thought. Like that is there's like a whole cult following of this. Should it be sharp? Should it not be sharp? And Americans especially, they're like, it needs to be it needs to be sharpened. And it needs to have a very fine edge. It needs to be very pointy.
00:09:10
Speaker
More as most British and European diggers are more like, well, it needs to be worn, it doesn't need to be sharpened, you don't want to grind it down. And even a lot of people like in Scotland, that's going to find really like a rounded point on them because they find it's easier to excavate postholes. And it seems there's a lot of postholes in Scotland from what I've been told.
00:09:32
Speaker
As someone who did their undergraduate degree in Scotland and had to do some excavation practice, I can say it's a lot of post-horses, which, you know, for those who are interested in it, great. But I have to say, after a while, looking at a different colour of soil, I got a little bit bored with it. But anyway, but yeah, so I remember first getting my first archaeology trial, and I was trying to work out whether to get the, I was looking up like, what's the best one? And in the end, I ended up ordering from you and got one from Anvil and You, which we'll talk about again in a bit.
00:10:00
Speaker
Yeah, I was looking at whether to get, what's it, WHS or Marshalltown or something. They seem to be like the two big brands. And I made the mistake of posting on my Facebook, archaeology friends, which one do you have? Like, I can't decide. And oh, my gosh, like it was a
00:10:15
Speaker
I've never had so many comments on a post before. It was all these different people and it seemed to be very strongly one or the other. But apparently it's sort of different ones for different soil types. So I mean, based on your experience with making them, what would you sort of suggest depending on, I don't know, which soil type or which region you're in, what kind of trials would you suggest for people to get?
00:10:38
Speaker
I know that a lot, well I make different patterns now as well so I have your classic Philadelphia pattern, your classic London pattern and then also my own pattern which is the one I sell the most common of. My pattern is modified basically from the traditional pointing drow which puts the angle of the shoulders at a 26.8 degree angle from the rise.
00:11:01
Speaker
that makes it sharp enough to cut soil when you pull back to yourself, as well as giving a long enough blade to really tease out delicate things around larger stones. I find it works really well with excavating slightly gravelly soil,
00:11:19
Speaker
and also Roman sites especially. It does really well with Roman sites. You're more diamond-shaped trials, which are really material kind, more Philadelphia pattern. Those ones are much more common to see where you have a lot softer soils. They're much more widely used in places like Greece and Italy, where their soils come off in more like plates.
00:11:41
Speaker
rather than as, I suppose, granules, if that makes sense. Now, your London pattern, I mean, that's very similar. It's just a little bit of a wider shape with a little bit more of a blunt nose. I mean, my pattern is very similar to that. And when I say blunt nose, I mean, it's just, it's not a perfect point. It's about a two mil point. And that's just your standard kind of shape. I mean, it's in between kind of a diamond and the triangular design that I usually go with.
00:12:11
Speaker
There's also, of course, other modifications that you see. Sometimes you get rounded shoulders, sometimes you get heart shapes. It's really down to, I think, personal preference as well. I mean, the broader the prowl, in terms of the width of the widest point, the less control you're going to have over it. So you're going to want to use it on softer soils.
00:12:33
Speaker
See, I never knew this when I started archaeology, that there were so many different specializations for all the different trials. So do you, I guess, do you have a lot of experience with excavation as well yourself?
00:12:44
Speaker
I do, yeah. I worked as a commercial archaeologist for six years. Okay, nice. And so did you then have kind of a toolkit or is it more standardized? I'm speaking now as someone who has done excavations, but I'm more the post excavation side of things. So I have my one trial that I use when I'm excavating. But I mean, for people who are excavating more regularly, are there then, do you have your toolkit of different trials types for different soil types?
00:13:10
Speaker
Well, I mean, I wouldn't, I mean, I kind of go more with the versatile approach myself, when certainly some people have more specific things. Well, I say that, but people who do it enough usually always have their own toolkit in some way or another. My specialty toolkit is more oriented towards focusing on small finds themselves. So when I excavate human remains, I prefer to use a bone tool or a wood tool for
00:13:38
Speaker
things like pottery. Again, I like to go with a wood tool for things like metal objects. I typically go with either metal or bone, both work really well around that. And when you say bone tool, just quickly, like, do you mean sort of like a sort of spatula type thing? Or what kind of what does that look like the bone tools?
00:14:00
Speaker
Well, one of the things I find works really well, and it avoids me having to make things because I don't really like working with bone. I thought you were about to say I didn't really like making things. I was like, second, this would not be a good time to say that. Sorry, carry on. No, sorry. Yeah, I like to use what are called bone creasers or bone folders for bookmakers.
00:14:24
Speaker
I find those work really well. I mean, you can of course make your own tools out of your roast lamb leg from Sunday brunch. But it's all up to, I suppose, personal preference. I mean, I knew a guy that he used a piece of broken cow bone for years that he picked up out of a field.
00:14:47
Speaker
which I guess fits nicely into the next question, which was what are archaeologists tools? So I guess the answer to that would be whatever you want. Basically, yeah. The number of people that I've met that use ladles, soup ladles for excavation is just phenomenal to me. Because personally, I hate them because they're too flimsy. Yeah, I'm trying to picture one. Yeah, yeah.
00:15:12
Speaker
But it was also really interesting, though, that there's so many different, I mean, that's like when we, I mean, when you look at tools in the past, which is basically what I do, and it's always assumed like, oh, yes, and this was used for that. And this was used for that. But it's like, okay, even even if you look at the archaeology toolkit that we're using to excavate this past, you're using a soup ladle, you know, to excavate the soil, like it's amazing how, how many different things can be repurposed, shall we say.
00:15:37
Speaker
for that kind of things. When I worked in America on an excavation, it was in the desert Southwest. So we had lots of sand. It was a big sand dunes. It was a Virgin Pueblo Anasazi and was the cultural group because it was just literally sand and digging sand out of pit dwellings. I saw people even using frying pans and using using those as like a scoop.
00:16:03
Speaker
So it's a case of you adapt with your environment, I think. That's fair. So for any people listening who want to start a career in archaeology, don't, you know, we'll obviously go to Anvil and you and buy yourself a lovely trowel, but in terms of the rest of your toolkit, don't worry too much. You'll find something, I guess. The final question that I found
00:16:26
Speaker
was, are archaeology trials any good? Which again, is one of those questions which I'm not really sure what the Google search was getting at. I guess maybe because the question that I got a lot when I was working in commercial archaeology was, you know, people saying, oh, but why are you using that tiny little trout? Like, you know, why aren't you using a massive spade or a shovel or something? I mean, would you say that they're effective? I would say they're effective. But what's your professional opinion?
00:16:49
Speaker
Oh yeah, I think that the trowel is the key object to have in your toolkit. I mean, it's going to be the thing that you're going to grab the most. And this is why I use two different sizes of trowels and two different shapes. I use a pointed trowel and I use a margin trowel, which is a square trowel. And I mean, it's the first thing you're going to grab. It's the best tool to use. It really is. You know, improvised tools really come about when you don't have quite the right thing in your toolkit to get it something you haven't encountered before.
00:17:17
Speaker
And so, I mean, I think that also we think about when we ask the question, are archaeology trials any good? I think some people are also wondering about the quality of them, because they're familiar maybe with the pointing trial, and they hear about the archaeology trial, and they think, well, they look the same, is there a difference in them? And then they might wonder about, you know, quality of the metal, or so on and so forth. Currently,
00:17:37
Speaker
I am the only person, the only business, the envelope is that offers archaeology trials and pointing trials in stainless steel and high carbon steel. No one else in the world does that. That's going to last you a lot longer and it's going to stay sharp longer. It's going to work better in gravels, especially. So I would recommend that for the investment because that is going to improve the life of the tool itself.
00:18:05
Speaker
I can attest as well, the trials from Anvil and you, not only are they extremely strong, but they look amazing. So any new archaeology students or anything who need to get a new one, definitely worth the investment also just because you'll look really cool on the excavation.
00:18:21
Speaker
Okay, so we know a little bit more about the archaeologist trial, but maybe, Zach, based on your level of expertise, you could tell us a bit more about the kind of history of tools and, I guess, blacksmithing in general. So, I mean, when did blacksmithing, either as we know it today or as kind of a starting concept, when did it actually start? Most people think of blacksmithing as having started in the iron.
00:18:44
Speaker
but they would be a little bit off actually because the roots in blacksmithing, the very structure of what it is, originates in really, if you want to think about the chocolithic, the copper age in the Near East.
00:18:58
Speaker
A lot of the techniques being used to hammer out copper objects from raw ore or from even smelted ore are then employed in the Iron Age later on. There's also some extent that those techniques are refined in the Bronze Age itself throughout Europe. Most people think that bronze objects are always cast and that is true to an extent they are always cast but sometimes are forged down further.
00:19:22
Speaker
Some of the work that we've seen from Sheffield Science Department for archaeology, we see that the very ends of some bronze axes demonstrate a grain structure that's elongated and much more compact. Now, that could occur from use, but it's more likely that it's also occurred since what are called ghost structures are not present.
00:19:44
Speaker
throughout that entire grain structure. I don't want to get too complicated here, but basically what we're saying is that means that it was probably heated at the end and hammered sharp, basically. And what that does is that makes it a stronger object. And so they knew that was happening in Ron's age. And so those concepts are then re-employed and further advanced and built upon in the Iron Age. And we use those same principles and concepts today. Whenever you
00:20:12
Speaker
Take a bloom of iron or a bar of billet of iron and you forge it into a shape. What you're doing is you're changing the microstructures of that metal. You're elongating it and you're compacting it. And if you think about in the same way that diamonds and other gemstones are formed, they are formed under extreme heat and pressure.
00:20:31
Speaker
It's kind of the same thing with base metals. That extreme heat and pressure from the hammer blows forces those grains closer together, which makes them stronger. It binds them together more securely. Okay. And I can remember I did one blacksmithing thing in my life. I worked with Dave Budd in Exeter to do my undergraduate thesis and we were doing steel sort of working.
00:20:57
Speaker
but also iron working beforehand. And it was really interesting for me to see, indeed, that the steel is that much stronger than iron. I mean, the iron, it seemed that you could really almost overwork it, or you could overdo things. So you mentioned that hammering and sort of working the bronze made it stronger. But then I felt, again, I'm an extreme amateur in this. So I could be just being one of these Google search people. But to me, it almost seemed that the raw iron, so the first ones that were being used
00:21:24
Speaker
might not necessarily have been stronger than bronze? Or was it? Why? What was the advantage basically of iron? Why did we start using iron over other precious metals? You're very right about that. And this comes down to two principles, whether or not it's a binary or tertiary alloy. When we talk about iron, I mean,
00:21:45
Speaker
Steel is defined throughout the, how do you want to say it, the metallurgical community as having a carbon content greater than 0.07% by weight. So anything below that is considered to be iron.
00:22:02
Speaker
Now, in the iron age, especially in the early iron age, what we're seeing is we're seeing iron, our actual iron. It's very low carbon content. We're looking at carbon content as little as 0.03%, which is just absolutely... Oh, sorry. I said that wrong. It actually should be 0.007% and 0.003% is what we're looking at for those early iron age things. The extra zero makes a huge difference.
00:22:31
Speaker
And just to put that kind of in the perspective, like our modern tool steel, so think like your spanners, wrenches, even your hammers, things like that. There's carbon content on those and is usually between 0.9 and 0.12% carbon.
00:22:47
Speaker
Oh wow, okay. Yeah, so carbon has a very unique effect to the grain structure's ferrous objects. Now, you think like we've all heard of cast iron. Cast iron is defined as having more than 2.5% carbon within its object by weight. So that makes it extremely brittle. So that's significantly stronger than steel. Oh, brittle, okay.
00:23:14
Speaker
brittle. Yes, the more carbon you put into something, the more brittle it becomes. I see. Okay. And that's something that people don't always realize. So when we're talking about malleable iron, we're talking about iron that has a carbon content of less than 0.007%. We're looking at, you know, those early raw irons, where they have not been able to, we use the term cement, cement the carbon with inside the grain structures itself.
00:23:41
Speaker
Usually, this has to do with a lack of good airflow and a lack of introducing carbon throughout different stages of the protocents. By the later Iron Age, even as early as the Middle Iron Age, circa about 300 BC in Britain, we're starting to see steels coming about, but they're not what we know as steels today. They're not homogenous. They're heterogeneous.
00:24:08
Speaker
So that means there's pockets of really low carbon iron, there's pockets of medium carbon steel, and even in those little pockets of steel, there are horrible conglomerations of glassy slag inclusions, which again, that affects the structure of things. And those glassy slag inclusions are really icky, basically, if you use a technical term.
00:24:33
Speaker
So, they clearly knew that the steel was a good thing, or it was less brittle, shall we say, but they were still trying to work out how to do it. Exactly. Well, they knew that making that steel made it harder and made it something that lasted longer and was better than certainly the bronze. But now, going back to your original question about the benefit of this softer iron, was there a benefit to it?
00:25:00
Speaker
They had this new material. I think it came about as necessity, at least in some places. A lot of the tin mines were disappearing by the start of the Iron Age. And tin was becoming a more and more scarce resource. And they had this new metal. And I think they said, well, what can we do with this? And as they worked with it more and more, they began to find that it did work as well as bronze. Now, specifically, one thing makes iron
00:25:28
Speaker
and we'll just actually say raw iron, so iron less than 0.007%, closer to bronze and harder like bronze is phosphorus. And that's an interesting perspective because that makes that tertiary alloy that was describing. And phosphorus is commonly found in what's known as bog ore.
00:25:47
Speaker
And we know that in the iron age they were exploiting bogs specifically for the ore so that they could have that higher phosphorus content because they knew that coming from those bogs worked better. And with that...
00:26:01
Speaker
phosphorus does in the iron is it makes what are called Newman bands, one, and also two ghost structures during hammering, it can be worked at a lower temperature, and it work hardens much better, and it work hardens much more like bronze. So it doesn't matter if you quench it.
00:26:22
Speaker
See, it's an interesting material because having spoke with Henry Clear, as well as Peter Crewe, and even Craddock, for that matter, about working with phosphoric iron, you come to find that the foraging of it is very different than what we're familiar with, with both heterogeneous as well as homogeneous irons and steels. And that higher phosphorus content, usually it's a content that's greater than 1%.
00:26:50
Speaker
makes the steel, again, brittle. And if you overwork it, it causes the steel, or I should say the iron itself to crack and break, and it can't even be re welded or repaired. So it's actually very tricky to work the metal in that early period. And I think one thing that they would have also observed that I've come to find in my own research is that the more they use this phosphoric iron, the harder it did become.
00:27:16
Speaker
And so the more it actually saw use, the more it started to become more like the bronzes that they were familiar with. Of course, as more knowledge was gained towards, you know, a little later Iron Age, things again refined as I've already said. So I'll just leave that there.
00:27:34
Speaker
But that's really interesting then that they definitely, I mean, it obviously then took a while, I guess, before they arrived at something that where they were like, okay, this is a good usable material. So it's amazing that they stuck with it for that long. I mean, if they hadn't, if you know, imagine if whoever was doing it was like, oh, no, this sucks. We're not going to do it. We wouldn't have iron or steel. Exactly. Exactly. Which is quite interesting to think about. And I mean, your earliest iron objects come from both China and Egypt.
00:28:00
Speaker
Okay. I was just about to ask, because you were mentioned bog, bog ore. So I thought, oh, maybe it was there only in areas with bog, but no, okay. They're in other. Okay. Yes. We know we have a really good date from the, to the Macomb and dagger, which we know is about 1800.
00:28:17
Speaker
to 2200 BP. And that makes it one of the earliest iron objects in kind of our hemisphere. And that is really special metal, because that is from an astro... Well, I say asteroid, I should say actually meteorite, because meteorites are smaller, but that's actually from space. It's space iron. That's the way I like to think of it as.
00:28:41
Speaker
that actually I think I unfortunately haven't been able to go into that in much detail. But my region of study is paleo-innuit cultures from the Arctic. And they think that one of the potential ways that the two-knit people, so the culture that I look at, was getting iron was indeed from like meteoritic
00:28:57
Speaker
iron or something, which is just so cool. I would love to be able to look into that further. That is actually really interesting that you do mention that because I was recently reading a really interesting report along similar lines from that was about the native groups in Greenland, doing something very similar. Yeah, I think that was they found one source in Greenland or something, right? Like, yes, exactly. And they were making some other I think they're called ooloo knives. Yep, that's it. Yeah.
00:29:26
Speaker
So that was quite interesting as well.
00:29:29
Speaker
Which is very cool, then, that you have the iron coming from outer space, from bogs, so from water, basically, and then, I suppose, the smelting process, so actually breaking it down yourself as well. Well, the interesting thing with the space iron is... Space iron! Please, if anyone's researching this, use that as your title. Aliens did happen to place on archaeology. Indeed.
00:29:58
Speaker
It's usually actually not refined further. So usually it's not smelted down. It's usually not put into a furnace. Oh, wow. Usually it's forged. Yeah, it's pure enough. What's really cool about it is that it has these structures inside of it called windman's shot.
00:30:17
Speaker
And windmen schnotten structures are these really crazy looking almost tree-like, well I say tree-like, but they're currently circular grain boundaries. So it's just these crazy lines all intercepting.
00:30:33
Speaker
and Buchwald did a really good research paper on this. And they are still present in the metal because the metal doesn't reach a high enough temperature during the forging process to remove them. And the way they form, well, the way that they're forming in these kind of meteorites asteroids is by traveling through space under heat and pressure for thousands of years, well, basically on fire,
00:30:58
Speaker
And it's fascinating. I mean, technically they're not on fire because you can't have fire in a vacuum, but they're super heated and it's just, it's remarkable. And usually they're high in nickel as well. So there's like this really special bond between the ferrite and the nickel that you only see in those types of metals. And then presumably then you can indeed identify that from the finished artifact because if they weren't forged enough, that's still there.
00:31:26
Speaker
It is, it is. Oh, so cool. I mean, now you can get... This is why we're interested in artifacts. Well, exactly, yeah. I find it really interesting and fascinating as well. And you can also get women's Staunton patterning or similar to women's Staunton patterning in certain types of crucible steels as well. If they are cooled slow enough, and they're kept hot long enough, and they've reached a high enough temperature,
00:31:54
Speaker
which is also really kind of cool. And that's what's called True Damascus. And we see that coming from India, well, more specifically Persia, as early as 500 BC, which is really interesting and quite cool to think about. And that's sort of the highest quality steel, then, or?
00:32:13
Speaker
Yeah, it is, in a manner of speaking, because it's a combination of wusteit and that women's stotten grain structure that really gives a unique appearance to the metal, and where it has a very unique grain structure that you wouldn't normally see, where the perlite colonies... They're the ones with the really beautiful waves and things in it.
00:32:34
Speaker
Exactly. Now, some of that can be achieved, though, through pattern welding, which is a little bit of a different process than, you know, the Trudemaskis, which is the formations of essentially windmushdotten patterns with the Wusteidt. But
00:32:50
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really long technical thing to talk about. Maybe for the other day. If people are interested, I'm sure they can find various papers. But this is all, I mean, it's so interesting that there's so, I mean, you've been mentioning so many things related to chemistry, you know, percentage of carbon, all the same things. But I guess back in, you know, prehistory of the day, science, the kind of overlap between science and magic or, you know, the sort of magical properties or belief systems was
00:33:16
Speaker
it was a lot less of a distinction made, I guess you could say. So I know that from the brief reading that I was doing, a lot of cultures, both historically and maybe prehistorically, and even I think quite a lot of cultures in the present day that still do the more kind of traditional smelting technology and stuff, they had almost magical associations, these blacksmiths, like they were seen as almost a shaman figure or something. I mean, have you had experience with that yourself? Or what can you say further about that?
00:33:46
Speaker
Well, certainly, yeah, and I think that certainly in the past there was this, since they didn't understand the chemistry, they didn't understand the metallurgy, it was a very much this magical process. I mean, the Romans had this belief that quenching the steel in the urine of a red-headed boy would make it stronger, you know? Hey, so your wealth dropped already then?
00:34:12
Speaker
Exactly, yeah. And so you see things like that all through history. African groups like the Dogons have been especially a focus in the last 20 years for these kinds of ethnographic archaeology reports on myth and magic within metal production.
00:34:28
Speaker
because they still have a lot of those superstitions today about making the smelter is the woman's womb and the iron ore going in is the man's seed and the bloom coming out is the baby being born. Which you don't put to death on an anvil but you know that's fine.
00:34:48
Speaker
There's like all these different processes that go into that. You can only drink certain things at certain times around it, at different stages. You can only eat certain things at certain times. And it's very complex, shall we say. And I think that that mythos then does still exist in some places in the world.
00:35:09
Speaker
And I think to some extent, in a way, we as blacksmiths sometimes do have our own little rituals and things that we do, that we think work that help. Yeah.
00:35:20
Speaker
I don't know. I mean, it's a matter of I suppose thought process. I sometimes add like when I do things with mild steel, sometimes I get requests for you know, things that recycled steel or things out of mild steel, like knives or letter openers. And sometimes what I do is I use a ball peen hammer to hammer the spine of it to try to
00:35:44
Speaker
I do it at a lower temperature in an attempt to create that Newman banding I mentioned, basically work hard to make it a little bit of a stronger steel, even though it has such a low carbon content. I can't tell for certain if it does work, it seems to work.
00:36:03
Speaker
I wouldn't know until I cut it in half and looked at it with optical luminescence, you know, spectroscopy. So it's kind of one of those things that's
00:36:15
Speaker
I think it works. You can call it a superstition. It makes sense in theory, because of work hardening and what I know about work hardening. But to verify it, I need to do that extra process of scientific analysis. That's one of the things I like about experimental archaeology is we get that opportunity often.
00:36:33
Speaker
Yeah, to get to see both sides. And that's interesting, you mentioned the sort of understand, you know, the theory of it works, practical side of it works. Because I mean, presumably, in the past, they wouldn't necessarily have been like, ah, yes, it's reached a temperature of, you know, 150 degrees centigrade, and it has 0.7% carbon, you know, they would have just had a feeling, you know, or, or known, which I guess, similar to what you were just talking about then as well. And I guess that's also I mean, how much do you think they actually understood about the
00:37:01
Speaker
the chemical properties or the kind of practical properties of what they were doing compared to just sort of a feeling or a belief in what they were doing. Well, I think that you're very right about that. And that's also kind of interesting you do mention that because
00:37:16
Speaker
Well, they didn't understand the exact degrees centigrade, or they were able to tell by the color. We still use that today. That's still your predominant purpose, actually, and focus on your forging things as you tell the temperature of the metal by the color of the metal.
00:37:31
Speaker
go from what we call dark cherry red all the way up to what most people call white hot. White hot is almost sparking temperature. That's the temperature you're really looking at for welding things together under a forge and hammer, or I should say hammer and anvil. We know that they were using forge welding techniques in the Iron Age already. It's a process that's been around for the better part of basically 2000 years.
00:37:59
Speaker
I remember that just reminded me of because these experiments that I did for my thesis was welding, doing forge welding, and I can indeed remember it being white hot and it was just start sparking and then you had to take it out and hammer it to death basically to try and get it welded.
00:38:16
Speaker
I still need to write up those experiments. It was what I did for my undergrad, so of course at that point you don't think that you're ever going to write something up. But I do need to write it up because referring a little bit back to the sort of, I guess, magical associations with it, basically the thesis topic was looking at how seaweed could have been used in metalworking.
00:38:34
Speaker
because there was a site that my supervisor had found in Iceland, a Viking Age site, and they'd found seaweed in the Forge area. So I was basically doing a bunch of different experiments to try and work out, okay, could it have been used? Where could it have been used? Does it actually work? With Dave Budd, who's another professional archaeologist and experimental archaeologist and blacksmith.
00:38:53
Speaker
But yeah, and it was good fun trying it in all sorts of different things. I used it as a fuel, does not work, by the way, and I used it to create what's it called? The thing that binds the metal together when it's a flux to bind the metal together during forge welding. And I made a tar and I did all sorts of things. But one thing that did happen was when I used it as a fuel in the fire, the smell was very reminiscent of another kind of weed substance, shall we say, which obviously I had very limited experience
00:39:23
Speaker
with but you know the smell has a very distinct smell right and you could really smell that and my uh now husband then boyfriend was working helping me and he was working the bellows and he was like at some point he said I think I need to step outside like I need to get a bit of fresh air because you did feel a little bit like oh okay and it made me wonder like huh I wonder if that was almost a kind of a ritual shall we say you know of uh getting yourself into the zone you know of of doing the kind of uh
00:39:52
Speaker
Well, I mean it doesn't surprise me actually.
00:39:55
Speaker
It would make actual sense if it was used in that way. It's very interesting concept that, especially because we're talking about Scandinavian people, and we know that the Scandinavians had all kinds of use for hallucinogens, for mind altering substances throughout various practices, even battle, which is, you know, the berserker and the mushrooms is just fascinating.
00:40:25
Speaker
I need to write it up at some point. And it also just goes to show that experimental archaeology is great for so many different reasons because you get the scientific side of things and the theoretical side of things. But then you also, I mean, if I'd done that in a lab, you know, I wouldn't have had that experience at all, which I think is really interesting.
00:40:43
Speaker
moving on a little bit. So we did already introduce you in the first section of this episode and what you do, but perhaps we can go into a bit more detail now. So you have this business, Anvil and you, blacksmithing. How did that start? So you mentioned that you got into the interest of sort of metalworking through your father and through that side of things, but when did you decide, okay, this is going to be my job. This is going to be my life from now.
00:41:07
Speaker
Well, I suppose it came about when it was just too difficult to balance my PhD and working as a commercial archaeologist part time.
00:41:17
Speaker
there just wasn't a lot of companies that were willing to have a part time commercial archaeologist. I could not work full time and do my PhD full time. It just was too much. I tried my first year. I tried to do you know, 35 hours a week on that and 35 hours a week on my PhD thesis and that was just no. I can try to get to working like a full time job alongside my PhD. I can't imagine it.
00:41:44
Speaker
Yeah, it was not fun, especially when you're doing the commercial work because you're always covered in mud. You're always wet. You're always cold. And so that was just exhausting. And so I said, well, I need to do something else. And I started and I was already doing experiments for my PhD with with kind of different types of metal production techniques or trying to see if my thoughts and perspectives on some of these production techniques
00:42:13
Speaker
were actually producing the items I was looking at, shall we say. And so I was doing that. And I thought, well, you know, might as well just expand this into a business. And that will help me to kind of have a part time job in essence. And so I did. And then it just kind of grew from there. And unfortunately, I say unfortunately, but while it is an unfortunate thing, we've had so many cutbacks within solid archaeology and institutions.
00:42:43
Speaker
that it's just become near impossible to get a research position. You're competing with people who've been made redundant, who have five or 10 years of experience when you're early career, which makes it very difficult. And so I've just instead gone full bore into becoming a CEO, making a limited company of what was just a little part time, you know, part time business that was
00:43:13
Speaker
just a sole trader type thing, you know, which is funny really, because years ago, it was just a hobby that I did when I wasn't working in commercial archaeology, just for fun.
00:43:24
Speaker
sell things here and there, but I just never imagined that it would become, you know, a limited company today. Out of curiosity, do you find it's, it's sort of, because you mentioned, I did it as a hobby, I did it for fun. I mean, a lot of people say, don't make your hobby your job, because you know, it won't be fun. But then a lot of people say, Oh, no, you know, make your hobby your job, because then it's the best, you know, you're just enjoying yourself every day, which field do you fall into?
00:43:49
Speaker
Well, I'm kind of, it depends on what we're talking about. We'll put it that way. Like, there are certainly cases where, well, I get wholesale orders now. Yeah, so I work with Past Horizons, who you might be familiar with. Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah. I make travels for them now. Oh, great. Congratulations.
00:44:09
Speaker
Well, thank you. I'm hoping to get a new contract with some of the building companies as well for pointing trials, which is also good. But then it's producing those trials in a larger quantity. And that can be a little bit tedious, shall we say, because it gets to a point where you're doing the same thing every day and you just get kind of, but
00:44:33
Speaker
As you grow and do more of that, you can hire somebody else to do a lot of that for you. Which is what I realized. You're the creative director. Exactly. Someone else doing it. For me personally, the thing that, I mean, I always love doing the metalwork. I don't mind doing the metalwork at all. That is always still a passion, always will be. It's the handles. It's the sanding of things. It's the putting them together. It's the polishing everything, making it beautiful.
00:45:01
Speaker
That's where I go, oh, I'm bored, I want to find something else. Fair, fair. And you mentioned that you're sort of expanding out, I guess, or I suppose you already have expanded out into non-archaeological type things, but what you did get into archaeology, was it that that made you decide to sort of have a predominantly archaeological inspiration for the business? Or was it just something you fell into?
00:45:28
Speaker
Well, I think it was because of my background archaeology that made me, you know, kind of start to focus first on the archaeology tools, especially seeing where there were tools that were needed that didn't yet exist. Like, you know, what I call my crypto, my crypto is becoming more and more popular. And it's a wonderful thing for various types of excavations and nice, picky things that works great.
00:45:54
Speaker
People were using before the little mini-matics. They're like, oh, that's not quite right. So I started making these things and it's just like, oh, this works a lot better. It just pulls things out of the way, shuffles some soil around, shuffles the gravel around. Don't need a cow boat anymore. Well, exactly.
00:46:14
Speaker
No, you still need to count them because if you're doing human remains or animal remains, different tools, different purposes. Okay, yeah, so it just sort of felt you filled your own hole in your own toolkits then. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, it's largely based on consumer demand to be to be to summarize it really.
00:46:38
Speaker
I mean, surprisingly now I've been getting, well actually ever since lockdown happened and people started getting more into their hobbies, I've been getting more requests for bowmakers draw knives, which is brilliant because
00:46:51
Speaker
there's not well nobody else makes bowmakers draw knives right now because why would they? I mean bowmaking is kind of a dead hobby but it's coming back so which is actually quite fun there's a lot of people like I want to build my own cell phone it's like good for you here's a tool to do it I wouldn't
00:47:12
Speaker
That actually reminds me, one of the other Google Autofill questions that I found, which I wasn't sure whether to include, but why don't we do it, was, is blacksmithing still a job? So I mean, because you've mentioned a few times now that you're sort of the only one who makes these different things. How rare is it as a job?
00:47:27
Speaker
Yeah, that's kind of an interesting thing. If you would talk about, like, knife making, there are a lot of knife makers and bladesmiths out there. A lot of hammer makers as well. What we start to see more of a limit in is other types of tools, like I was describing. We see that there's not as many, what shall we say, tools, general toolsmiths as there used to be.
00:47:49
Speaker
And I mean, you certainly see a lot of people doing what I call general iron mongering. So a lot of people do in the drawer pools and things like that. But usually those are hobbyists who do it on a weekend or after they've come back from work and they just want to be creative, you know. Yeah. And to be honest, a lot of that stuff that those guys make is absolutely phenomenal because it's it's so it's just they've been doing the same drawer pools for 20 years.
00:48:17
Speaker
And they just have their own special tools to form them. A lot of them make what are called custom swages so they can get a perfect leaf pattern every single time on them, which is great.
00:48:31
Speaker
This, the dedication to building that can only come out as a hobby, because if you try to do it as a business, you wouldn't be able to make enough profit back on those items. Fair enough. Yeah. Related to that, I mean, how, if, for example, you could, you know, talk to yourself back when you started, Anvil and you, what is sort of the biggest difficulties that you face as a small business owner? What kind of advice would you give to other people who are thinking of saying, oh, you know, listening into this and saying, well, I enjoy my hobby. Maybe I should make it into a business.
00:49:01
Speaker
I think the best advice I could give in that regard would be to say it's going to take a lot more work on the back end as you grow than you think it is. There's a tipping point you're going to reach where you're going to become stagnant in terms of profit and sales and marketability.
00:49:22
Speaker
And at that tipping point, you need to decide if you're going to just back off and do it as a hobby, do something else for your main income, or if you're going to push forward. If you're going to push forward, then you're going to go from being that sole trader to a limited company. And you're going to stop working in your business as much and start working on your business more.
00:49:48
Speaker
I think that's very good, but I'm making notes. It's true indeed. And especially when it's something I suppose that is more crafty indeed, you know, when you're actually producing something, it is even more difficult because you can't just indeed spend all of the time creating anymore. You have to spend more time on admin, I guess.
00:50:09
Speaker
Yeah, that's it. And I mean, it's a weird place to be in because when you first go to that limited company type thing, you don't necessarily have all the big, I would say, monies that you want to need to be able to hire everyone that really streamline things right off the bat. Sometimes you get lucky and you have a lot of investors and you can do that, but not always. And as you grow, you can hire more people to help automate more of those administrative tasks.
00:50:39
Speaker
And as you can automate more of those administrative tasks, the business can grow and develop more and you can really push it forward. So those are always things to think about. And I guess think of it then as, you know, the prehistoric first blacksmith, you know, if they hadn't pushed through and continue doing what they did, we wouldn't have steel. Just like with businesses, if you don't push through and, you know, there's a metaphor for you. You've got to keep pushing through to get steel.
00:51:07
Speaker
Well, exactly. And I mean, from my research, come the point that in the Iron Age, a lot of objects came about because they were patrons for those objects to be made. And I mean, for like thinking about chariot wheels, you know, and just building a chariot and just the iron work on a chariot alone, you're looking at your production. The only way that can happen is if you have people being fed by someone, you know, and their basic needs being met and their shelter being provided for them. So that's patronage.
00:51:36
Speaker
And a lot of times today, we don't have that same patronage in the arts of any kind, which is unfortunate. And that makes creativity more difficult. And I think that is a problem with the modern era that we haven't addressed is that same patronage on such a wide scale as we saw previously in the past. Yeah. Which, I mean, they're trying to, I guess that's what things like, for example, the crowdfunding platforms and all of this, they're sort of almost getting a bit closer to that again, would you say?
00:52:06
Speaker
I think they're trying to. And I think that the unfortunate thing, I think with those kinds of platforms, a lot of times, people still seem really the general public seems really drawn to technology. And unless you're offering something that's technologically innovative, the funding is slow to come in.
00:52:28
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Which is a problem with archaeological inspired crafts, I guess, because the technology is more based in our past. Well, exactly. I have a good friend in America who started as an archaeologist and he did commercial archaeology for years. He became a pottery specialist. He got tired of doing commercial archaeology and then became a potter.
00:52:56
Speaker
Basically, he just set aside all of his per diem from his jobs for starting the business. And after about five years, he had enough money to seed the business and he started a small farmers markets.
00:53:08
Speaker
Now it's his main income. He sells online. And it's incredible. I guess it is time. Well, there is a will, there's a way. Yes, exactly. That's a good moral to have. So, I mean, we've talked about the difficulties, but what would you say is the most exciting thing that's happened in Anvil and you? And also, do you have any exciting plans for the future if they're not, you know, secret?
00:53:27
Speaker
Well, I do have some of the same plans for the future. I'm launching a new product line called Dr. Zex Heritage Tools. So I'm bringing about a lot more tool patterns, with slight renovation, or innovation, I should say, to them, that are taken from historical texts. We have a lot of these old tool catalogs from the 18th and 19th centuries of tools that are no longer produced, that had specialty purposes. And so we're going to be bringing out some of those tools again.
00:53:56
Speaker
especially as we see hobby crafts increasing. The first one that will be becoming more widely available will be the what I call the dog legged ads. Now there's a few different makers of them, you know, just sole trader type people, but there's not any that are being made really on a large scale. Now this is a nice little compact ads, it doesn't have the wood handle.
00:54:18
Speaker
that's just on all steel construction and it makes it a little bit more easy to carry and it's much more suited for doing small crafts like little balls or whatever wood curvy in the garden if you're into that kind of thing. So yeah, I'll be doing some things like that and that's a really new exciting direction that I'm going to be taking that. Also I'm hoping, well I shouldn't say, well not hoping, yeah I say hoping, hoping is a good way to put it.
00:54:46
Speaker
Hoping, planning, and we'll see how things go, but I'm hoping by year three, I mean, that's what I'm kind of planning on, having a limited company now to get more into power metallurgy, because I think there's a really good future for the power metallurgy and bringing that power metallurgy into manufacturing to more reinvigorate the manufacturing process, because we want to go from producing lots of stuff to sit on warehouse shelves, which is not friendly in terms of carbon,
00:55:15
Speaker
and instead go on to what I call on-demand manufacture. That's one of the things that's always at the forefront of my business is that concept of on-demand manufacture, produce as it's needed, that when materials are not wasted, and more specifically, the fuels used to produce those materials aren't wasted.
00:55:35
Speaker
Because, as we know, we need all the carbon we have because there's only 0.03% of it. I know it's a different kind of carbon in the tools. Sorry, I'm just making a silly joke about the carbon content of steel tools, but that's fine. It clearly wasn't a very good one.
00:55:54
Speaker
But I think, no, I think indeed, that's really nice. They're sort of sustainable. And that's what the great thing is of, I think, when businesses start out small, is because you are indeed used to doing it on a smaller scale at the beginning. So that sort of ethos, shall we say, remains strong, which is, I think, really great. Yes.
00:56:09
Speaker
I mean, it has its own set of issues when you start to think about things like powering out energy because it's a carbon offset equation and it's something that you do have to think about because you have to remember that using laser sintering does generate gases as well. So it's a very careful equation. Is it better to run the gas forge or is it better to run the laser?
00:56:39
Speaker
Well, hopefully, indeed, it builds up. Yeah, I think that probably marks the end of our tea break. So, you know, it sounds like you have a lot to do. So indeed, I should probably let you get back to work then and get back to planning.
00:56:54
Speaker
But thank you so much for joining me today. And yeah, if anyone else wants to find out more about Zach's work with Anvil and you or the research that he's doing, or, you know, blacksmithing, archeology toolkits, anything like that, that we've been talking about, check the show notes on the podcast homepage and I'll provide lots of lovely links on there. So I hope that you enjoyed our journey today and see you next month for another episode of Tea Break Time Travel.
00:57:19
Speaker
I hope that you enjoyed our journey today. If you did, make sure to like, follow, subscribe, wherever you get your podcasts. And I'll see you next month for another episode of Tea Break Time Trouble.
00:57:31
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.