The Early Casting of Iron
A Stage in Iron Age Civilization
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4490526 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Thomas T Read (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1934 |
| Volume | 24 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 544 |
| Publication date | 1934-10-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Geographical Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0016-7428 • E-ISSN: 1931-0846 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/208844 |
| OpenAlex | W2323397057 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
V ESPITE the large amount of work that has been done on the history of iron and the important way in which that metal is interrelated with archeological studies, in both the geographical and the historical fields, very little scholarly research has been directed towards the discovery of the casting of iron and its implications. Archeologists and geographers are generally unfamiliar with the technical processes involved, while conversely mineral technologists are unfamiliar with the geographical and cultural aspects. Two recent writers in the metallurgical field have supported the erroneous belief, widely held, that iron was not cast before the Middle Ages. J. Newton Friend concludes his Iron in Antiquityl with brief note on the discovery of cast which he ascribes to accident in the operation of the German stiickofen in the Middle Ages. But museums have many specimens of cast iron that antedate medieval times by more than a thousand years. T. A. Rickard in his Man and Metals says: making of cannon, and more particularly the making of cannon-balls, was the chief incentive to the invention of cast-iron.2 The need for a cheap metal from which to cast cannon balls and cannon did indeed furnish a new use for cast iron, while the stiickofen made it cheap. But cast iron had been used for other purposes more than a thousand years before
Ancient history · Archaeology · Casting · Civilization · Iron Age · Metallurgy · Stage (stratigraphy · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Geology · Historical and Archaeological Studies · History · Materials Science · Metallurgy and Cultural Artifacts · Paleontology
| Citations per year | 0.07 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1969 - 2021 (53) |
| Highly cited | No |