Basquesmith · Ironworking technology and social complexity of rural comunities during the Early Medieval Ages

Ironworking technology and social complexity of rural comunities during the Early Medieval Ages

The situation in the Basque Country during Early Middle Ages (EMA) is in striking contrast with this traditional view of commoners during EMA who often represent the paradigm of the ‘Dark Ages’: impoverished and rather resource-limited (e.g. Fossier and Chapelot 1980) and with scant or null access to iron metallurgy since this was an expensive technology only affordable to elites. On the one hand, there seems to be a steady production of iron which spanned for several centuries ‒at least from 3rd to 14th centuries AD‒ reaching its peak during the Early Medieval period (Alberdi and Etxezarraga 2014). On the other hand, seemingly the major potential consumers of that iron were not elites but a network of more than 300 farmsteads, hamlets and villages of rural condition whose habitants enjoyed an abundant and varied paraphernalia of all type of implements for everyday life such as farming, carpentry, clothes-fitting, cutlery, etc. (Larreina-Garcia and Quirós Castillo 2018). The Basquesmith project aimed to investigate the engineering parameters behind the production of farming tools and common implements by examining the manufacture of artefacts, such as scissors, horseshoes, sewing needles, belt buckles and clasps, ladles, keys, etc. as well as by examining technical materials (e.g. slag) from both the smelting sites which presumably reduced the iron, as well as the few evidences rarely found at the farming sites where the artefacts were excavated. Equally, the project aimed to explore topics never addressed such as the origins and development of this smelting technology, its diachronic evolution and geographic spread, a comparison of end-products purportedly produced by a similar process, or the interplay between iron-makers in the mountains and iron-consumers in the valley. To provide the first archaeometric approach to these questions a total of 102 implements were examined by metallography and 61 technical materials analysed by microscopy. The originality lies in the study on a range of objects that have rarely been examined, and excavated from rural settlements that stand out as equally unusual contexts against cemeteries, hoards and urban environments. The scientific approach includes microanalysis by Optical Microscopy (OM) and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM-EDS) to describe and analyse materials and microstructures; and X-radiograph studies prior to metallographic analysis to assess the condition and to investigate the overall assemblage. For the technical materials, it also includes XRF and XRD microanalysis to obtain bulk chemical composition and mineral identification.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union