I've been trying to dig up references for how steel was made in Noricum. All I can find are references to bloomery furnaces.. but was the steel made directly in the stack or did they have a refinement/carburizing feature following the iron bloom production? I would like to follow a historical process as closely as I can in my steel making endeavors, and this seems like a good model due to the (supposed) high quality nature of the steel.

Good evening!

There was a very fine documentary about this in a german chanel. The territory was hidden by a meteorite in the 5-6th Cent. BC, like the one of Tunguzka. It explodednear to the earth surface, (these territory is called Chiemgau) and it's remains are little metallpellets everywhere in the ground there (and even in honey, etc) or something like that. The celts there made double piramid ironblogs and these special blades from this material. The reenactment blacksmith in the film did paternwelding with his ironblooms.

Oh, and, according to the film, the celts begun after the meteorite came down, to use the burning whire as simbol and to fear the sky could fall down again :eek:

You should probably search in the german net.

Zoltán

The Chiemgau impact theory seems to be more than a bit dubious. See http://scienceblogs.com/aardvarchaeology/2011...p.php#more and http://scienceblogs.com/aardvarchaeology/2010...sis_is.php

For another theory, see http://www.3rd1000.com/chem201/chem204j.htm
From the article:

At Noricum, smelting yielded steel directly because iron carbonate ore such as that found there can produce it; the ore naturally contained some manganese so an alloy steel, and a good one, was obtained. A modern alloy steel, stainless steel, contains 0.4% carbon, 18% chromium, and 1% nickel. Noricum had 3 to 6-foot shaft furnaces with forced draft and some control of the degree of carbonization.

Just scrap that Chiemgau theory, it's a bunch of funny pseudoscientists getting time and again their 15 minutes of fame. Their arguments so far are far from convincing.
There have been trials to reconstruct the production of Noric steel. If I remember correctly the trick was stopping the process before the smelted iron is too much decarburized by the heated airflow. In my opinion it has some resemblance to Sub-Saharan steel production.
The other method of production of that age were the Chinese and the Parthian method that mixed iron with higher and lower carbon content.
These might interest you:
Die Produktion von Ferrum Noricum am Hüttenberger Erzberg, die Ergebnisse der interdisziplinären Forschungen auf der Fundstelle Semlach/Eisner in den Jahren 2003 - 2005 (German)
Ferrum Noricum und die Stadt auf dem Magdalensberg (German)
Ferrum Noricum (German)

To put this theory into perspective.
Just try and imagine how much iron/steel was produced in that period.
After that try to imagine how big the meteor must've been to contain that much material.

Who would be left to mine the ore after such an impact. ;)

Yes, this makes sense.

Black celts :D :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bA9KwGcOxCk&feature=related

The wole process is on other video-parts. It may help to imagine how a whole village may had made iron products by the celts.

Zoltán

In the reconstruction of the Magdalensberg steel production they used a smaller bloomery (Rennofen) and weren't able to pull out the iron without first shutting down the whole process (but they discovered lots of problems during the trial, so this shouldn't be taken as a final verdict). If this archaeological reconstruction is right the depicted Africans run a more efficient system.

Very interesting folks.... Thank you. I suspected that they were making steel directly in the stack. And interesting about interrupting the process....

Wootz was made from small pieces of iron in a crucible.... Not directly from ore. So are you saying that the iron that was used had an alloying element that made it's use in wootz more beneficial?

On another related topic... What do folks here know about European (pre blast furnace) methods for carburizing bloomery sourced iron into steel? My understanding is that most bloomeries throughout Europe were short stack, iron making furnaces. So I'm trying to gain an understanding as to how steel was made. I'm starting to now see that many folk had to import their higher quality steel... Either from places such as Noricum or regions making wootz.

Kurt... Do you have a reference for using cast iron to carburize iron? Or time periods? I was under the impression that cast iron was rare in pre-medieval iron making or that it was considered useless. My understanding is that the furnace geometries were simply incapable of making cast.... But I'm still wet behind the ears in this pursuit...