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| Jílek L. |
| FORGING HISTORY |
| Keywords: |
| No 1 (2000), p. 5-19 |
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| Petrík J., Mihok Ľ.., Lesniaková Z., Soláriková M., Fröhlich L., Vadász P. |
| THE EXPLOITATION OF IRON ORE, SMELTING AND PROCESSING OF IRON IN THE SURROUNDINGS OF SPIŠSKÁ NOVÁ VES |
Abstract
Spiš county is one of the regions of Slovakia with harsh conditions of the nature but with rich sources of iron and non - ferrous metal ores. They had became a base of well-developed metallurgy and craftsman's processing of metals, which culminated in the period between the 16th and 17th centuries and slowly extincted by the end of the 19th century. The bloom furnaces were main producers of iron by the half of the 19th century, altough the first blast furnaces were blown - in in this region in the second half of the 18th century.
In the surroundings of the town Spišská Nová Ves the iron ore was mined in Bindt and Rudňany localities until recently.
In the Middle Ages the mined ore was reduced in small iron smelting plants in Spišská Nová Ves and its surroundings. In the period from 1803 to 1886 an iron smelting plant with blast furnaces, finery hearts and hammers worked in the village Smižany near Spišská Nová Ves. Only slag pieces can be found in the place of this extincted plant in present.
The aim of the submitted work is the reconstruction of smelting process of iron and used technologies of the final iron products using archaeometallurgical analysis of slag found in the place of the iron smelting plant in Smižany (at the bank of Hornad river, about 200 m to the west from the road bridge Smižany - Smižianska Maša) and iron museal artefacts. According to the content of the trace elements in the local iron ores, slags and the final products an attempt of the reconstruction of the material flow could be done.
Microstructural, chemical, X-ray and spectral analysis of the slag showed, it was the slag from the charcoal blast furnace, that resulted from local iron ores reduction in the period mentioned. A part of the analyzed slag containted sulphur as a result of mineral fuel used in the reduction process. Although according literary sources mineral fuel was used in Spiš since the end of the19th century, this fact proves its occasional use in the course of the 19th century.
The iron products, artefacts from collections of the Spiš Museum in Spišská Nová Ves - miner's axe, hammer and chisel, used by local miners in the 19th century, were also analysed, using microstructural, microhardness and spectral analyses.
The axe was made from homogeneous steel, refined in puddling furnace. The hammer was made from iron bloom, the fibrous structure was the result of the hard deformation of relatively soft feritic material. The chisel had high carbon steel tip, smithy welded on the heterogeneous back, the tool was quenched. These products were probably made from the iron smelted from the iron ore mined somewhere in Spiš (typical content of Mn, Cu, Ni, Ag), but the iron ores mined in Bindt and Rudňany were not used. The production technologies of these tools are typical for the 19th century, which provided them good quality and utility values.
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| Keywords: Spiš|iron metallurgy|archaeometallurgy| |
| No 1 (2000), p. 74-83 |
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