Sustainability
Sustainable
iron production
the ‘Viking way’ Words Martin Clark Photography Martin Clark
The 10-country EU-supported ‘Green Village’ project ran a community interactive action in Iceland recently Carolina (IT) with Dave Watson (Uk), Margrét Hrönn Hallmundsdóttir (Ice) and the ‘Viking-Age’ iron kiln.
Archaeologists, researchers, rural developers and linguists from Italy,
Romania, Slovakia and the United Kingdom descended on the hamlet of Árbær near Selfoss on Iceland’s rugged south coast to re-enact Viking Age iron production.
Working with local villagers led by Margrét Hrönn Hallmundsdóttir,
an archaeologist from NAVE, the purpose was to investigate how sustainable our ancestors were. The first task was to build a kiln based on archaeological evidence - the ‘footprint’ left by the intense heat needed to melt iron. The team knew that these early kilns were averaging 30cm diameter and (in Iceland) were built of turf and stone. Over a three-day period, turf, lava blocks and clay from hot springs was gathered and the kiln began to take shape. Carolina Lombardini from CNR-IVALSA in Italy researched the process – here she is with iron soil, charcoal and raw iron. 4 I Green Village
Sustainability
Up until the industrial revolution such kilns would have
been a common site, dotted around the northern landscape. Using local iron rich soil and charcoal, the experiment began with fire, a constant draft to give plenty of oxygen and layers of iron soil and charcoal fed in from the top of the kiln’s 90 cm high chimney.
Five hours later, the ‘slag’ was released from the kiln base like a mini-lava flow from nearby volcano ‘Hekla’. Then the kiln yielded a mucky mass of iron, charcoal Tapping the Slag From the bottom of the kiln. and cinders – called a ‘bloom’.
Our ancestors would then have beaten this with hammers, continually re-heating it and shaping it until the impurities were taken out. The figures –
38 kilos of charcoal + 37 kilos of iron rich soil (red ochre) gave 2.8 kilos of raw impure iron. The bloom was divided and Icelander Guðjón Stefán Kristinsson and UK blacksmith David Watson will create something memorable with it
The finished result - a ‘bloom’ of iron, ready for re-working into something useful
Project leader Martin Clark from Grampus Heritage in the UK explains what it’s all about... ’these days, we’re incredibly wasteful and we throw such a lot of things in the bin – including metal! Our common ancestors from the Medieval period knew the true value of metal because they worked incredibly hard for several days to produce just a few kilos. Iron was so precious that the poorest people had hardly any’. 5 I Green Village