New Book on Smelting!

[ThomasPowers]

While searching for the cite on an article in "nature" on monsoon wind powered smelting in Sri Lanka; I actually ran across the Author's Doctoral Thesis in print and very reasonable too. (I use abebooks.com)  423 pages, large format, very heavy due to all the photographs and good paper used: "Early Iron and Steel in Sri Lanka" Gillian Juleff  it was about US$12 for a new copy still in the publisher's shrink wrap.

I'm starting to plow through it (read the Editorial, Foreword, Preface, Acknowledgements, Glossary, Transliteration, and am in the Introduction right now (which covers previous work done in this area)  One of the real neat things is that Gillian did not just do excavation, she also talked with the people descended from the smelters and created and ran charcoal fueled wind powered bloomeries based on her finds and recorded the results including some photomicrographs of the steel produced!

Not an easy read being academic prose; but what a resource!

An interesting point from the glossary: The caste of people who were blacksmiths were the Navadanno; the caste of people who smelted the iron/steel was the Yamannu.   Many folks here have heard me mention time and again that the folks who smithed were not generally the folks who smelted the metal and here it is that they even were separate Castes!

[SLAG]

T. P.,

Thank you for the heads up.

I'll be ordering a copy tomorrow.

I'm much obliged.

SLAG.

[Frank Turley]

Copy sent for. Thanks, Thomas.

[ThomasPowers]

I get to thinking of the spring winds in New Mexico and all the adobe available and then I think of US Forest Service crews with Pulaski axes and attitudes!