Why Iron Man is a problem for archaeologists

One of the problems with studying archaeology is the (necessary?) fact that we are wholly separated from the past that we are studying - making it hard to access the minds and understanding of the people we want to learn about.

For historical archaeology part of this problem is reduced by the use of historical documents, written either by contemporaries, or the people in question themselves. But in prehistory this written source material does not exist. There is no literature that can place us directly in the minds of prehistoric people in Britain.

What do you think of when you hear the word “iron”? Even as an Iron Age scholar, my first thought isn’t necessarily the Iron Age. I think of Iron Man, I think of the Great Swords in the Game of Thrones books (technically “steel”, but that’s an alloy of iron so it’s ok – and an indication of how my mind works). You might think about the Ironbridge Gorge[1] in the Midlands, a UNESCO World Heritage Site called the “Birthplace of the Industrial Revolution”.

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My point is that iron and the uses of iron are so widespread nowadays it is hard to separate ourselves from these modern uses and connotations. How can we ever really escape them and fully understand the importance of metal in the Iron Age? Iron Man bares no resemblance to the practicality of iron smelting and metal-making for Iron Age people, and yet it’s still one of the first things that I think of.

I know from school how iron is extracted from its ore, but in prehistory the knowledge of the underlying chemical process was not known. The creation of metal from rock was viewed as a magical transformation. Although this viewpoint was first formed in the Bronze Age, when metalworking was introduced, the creation of iron is perhaps more mystical than that of bronze (an alloy of copper and tin).

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Chalcopyrite, the primary copper ore in Britain is already remarkable, it’s already shiny. And it has been suggested that this eye-catching property was one of the things that first attracted prehistoric peoples to the ore.

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The main source of iron ore is haematite, grey and dull. It doesn’t possess the same inherent attraction of copper, and yet this seemingly dull rock can still make metal – the transformation is amplified.

This concept of metal-making as a magical process has been discussed repeatedly in archaeology, most notably by Hingley [5] and Taylor & Budd [6]. Our problem as archaeologists is that we’ve lost this connection and belief in magic – we know too much about the science behind the process.  And so this makes it infinitely more difficult to access the minds of prehistoric people, without colouring our interpretations with our own modern connotations.

This problem of truly understanding the minds of past peoples is one of the central challenges in archaeology, and one without a definite solution.

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[1] http://www.ironbridge.org.uk/

[2] Iron Man artwork by Salvador Larroca from Wikipedia

[3] Image from the British Geological Survey “Copper Profile”, available here 

[4] Image from Wikipedia

[5] Hingley, R. 1997: Iron, Ironworking and Regeneration: a study of the symbolic meaning of metalworking in Iron Age Britain. In Gwilt, A. and Haselgrove, C. (eds.), Reconstructing Iron Age Societies (Oxford, Oxbow Monograph 71), 9–15.

[6] Budd, P. and Taylor, T. 1995: The faerie smith meets the bronze industry: magic versus science in the interpretation of prehistoric metal-making. In World Archaeology, 27, 133–43.