The morphology and geochemistry of blacksmithing slag from Mountain Shoria

Over the past decades, extensive research has been done by archaeometallurgists on ancient technologies of iron metallurgy. The article shows how, drawing on this body of research and data, it has become possible to reconsider the specific features of iron metallurgy of the whole region - Gornaya Shoria (Mountain Shoria, Russia). It is now known that metallurgical slag which was not paid much attention in the Russian scientific literature helps obtain invaluable information. The article presents an analysis of one of the types of metallurgical slag - blacksmithing slag - and points to how an erroneous perspective on this material has affected our understanding of the metallurgical tradition maintained by the Kuznetsk Tatars in the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries. The article describes morphological characteristics of the blacksmithing slag collected on 19 archaeological sites in Gornaya Shoria. Results of geo-chemical analyses of these samples and interpretation of the data are provided, and a great potential revealed of an integrated study of this type of material. New reconstructions of the technologies studied are shown to be supported by the seventeenth to the eighteenth century written sources. Based on this, a new method for assessing the productivity of Kuznetsk Tatar iron-making workshops is proposed. Using a single coefficient to conduct such assessment on all of the sites in the region was deemed possible due to the results of the morphological and geo-chemical analyses of the local blacksmithing slag - the similarity of the analyzed samples of slag suggests that similar iron-making traditions existed throughout the region.

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