Smelting Iron: Would a Hunter-Gatherer do that? Should I do that?

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#1

Hey,
I have a question! What about metal tools and iron smelting in our primitivist ideology?

It can be done with little more than your bare hands and a few simple tools, if you have the skill, of course. The ore pretty much lays on the ground (bog ore), you can use clay to build the furnace, a hard stone as an anvil and another stone as a hammer + some kind of tongs, maybe wooden. If you do the math, you can get enough natural draft, wind or water-powered bellows to do the appropriate amount of blowing for you. If not, you have to blow yourself.

It’s a hard, long and unforgiving task, requiring quite a bit of luck and experience (took a few smelts to even get the bloom to form). Every little detail counts and you can ruin the entire smelt by just a few minutes of carelessness. But theoretically, if you dropped me in the middle of a wilderness, I could make steel from scratch. I’ve done it before and I enjoy very much seeing the dirt and then a molten blob turn into a hard, forgeable material.

There are some problems though if hunter-gatherers were to do it. First, the earliest recorded cases of smelting are AFTER the agricultural revolution (or am I wrong?). Second, blacksmithing requires quite a bit of hard work, something HGs wouldn’t like.

Third, it eats into natural resources considerably (look at the forests in Scotland. Not seeing any? Hmmm…) I had to make some 20kg of charcoal for a smelt of 15kg of ore, which should have given me some 2kg of iron, but due to my incompetence, it only yielded 300g. :slight_smile: I used quite a bit of wood for that but I have no idea how it relates to, for instance, staying alive in -40C… Probably the amount of wood I’ve used is nothing vs the Alaskan winter.

So, my question to you is whether smelting is feasable and non-destructive enough to be practiced on a very small scale (personal needs) by hunter-gatherer bands/communities. Why? Why not?

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#2

I really like the idea of being able to apply low-tech blacksmithing techniques to scrap metal. To my mind, this is a much higher leverage activity than actually smelting ore. The amount of work required to take a leaf spring from an abandoned car and shape it into a tool seems reasonable to me, and is translatable to nearly all of the planet currently due to the Detroitus of civilization strewn everywhere.

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#3

Fresnel lenses can be salvaged from big screen tv’s and can replace burning wood to melt scrap steel. I’m a definite advocate of utilizing civ’s waste to enable the transition to ethical and sustainable lifestyles.

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#4

i agree with what has been stated by @andrew and @Ernesto.

i do not agree with continued mining or harvesting of ores, AND the reality is that there is already an incredible amount of scrap metal to work with all around us. and shit hasn’t even hit the fan yet… well, at least in some parts of the world. and in other parts of the world it certainly has. outrunning the apocalypse is merely a matter of privilege today.

anyway, i am sort of tearing into a tangent now. i think it would be unwise for us who are wanting to achieve a more sustainable future to overlook the abundant amount of reusable materials that litter and will continue to litter the landscapes around us.

and by not participating in the disposable cultures of the past, the knives and nails we make can be passed down through the generations. the scrap metal of our time could definitely be passed down for hundreds of years, maybe thousands.:slight_smile:

#5

I think it makes sense if there is reasonable quality ore like big iron or the glacier dropped stones in my creek available. Not to produce all the tools one needs, but maybe as a once a year event. In a subsistence oriented society methods and techniques which are not used are lost. There will be an enormous amount of salvage for a long time, but not forever. If people only use salvage it is entirely possible that no one will know how to smelt when that resource comes to an end. It would also be useful to smelt small, rusty, broken up pieces of salvaged material.

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#6

I’ve had this kind of chat with people recently and I’ve come to the conclusion that hunter-gatherers are not the paradigm for the future, but rather scavenger-gardeners. It will pay handsomely to be able to melt, smelt and work metal of all descriptions using all sorts of methods. Reforging and repurposing blades and axes, saws etc will be priceless. Flint is amazing stuff but a steel knife will always be needed. The idea of low-key forges and really diy metal-work is v appealing. There’s no point fetishising something from an ideological standpoint - where hunter-gatherers had access to metal, they used it, eg the Copper Eskimos.

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#7

this is a cool discussion topic. we are at a point in time where its wisest to integrate the past and the future, what worked, what didn’t and distill a way of living on earth that is harmonious and there are many ways to do that so its important to not get too rigid in our ideology cause that’s how conflict starts. there is such a ridiculous abundance of trash and scrap everywhere that it would be foolish to not use it and It would help clean up the mess we’ve made. keeping old knowledge and traditional wisdom alive is equally important but we don’t live in ancient times anymore and we are advanced enough to live in harmony with nature if we learned from our past and threw out what doesn’t work and applied what does work to create a fluid and harmonious way of being human and living on earth. its like combining the wisdom and techniques of the past with the knowledge and resource we have today and trash and scrap is a very abundant resource that should be integrated.

#8

It’s interesting that learning from people who lived rich lives and sustained connected cultures for millennia so often gets reframed as ideology. It’s almost as if people are sitting at their computer with a copy of Stirner and just looking for ways to work it into conversation.