Iron decarburisation techniques in the eastern Guanzhong Plain, China, during Late Warring States period: an investigati
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Iron decarburisation techniques in the eastern Guanzhong Plain, China, during Late Warring States period: an investigation based on slag inclusion analyses Yaxiong Liu 1 & Marcos Martinón-Torres 2
&
Jianli Chen 3 & Weigang Sun 4 & Kunlong Chen 1,5
Received: 14 December 2018 / Accepted: 19 August 2019 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract Iron production in the Central Plains area of China has been largely based on cast iron smelting since ca. fifth century BC, with different techniques developed in the following Warring States period and Han dynasty to convert this material into malleable soft iron. Whilst there is a broad consensus about the evolution of technological traditions in the Early Iron Age, the methodologies employed for differentiating artefacts derived from different iron smelting and decarburisation methods have been variable and not sufficiently conclusive. Taking advantage of renewed analytical approaches and archaeological evidence recovered in recent years, this paper summarises our current understanding of the decarburisation techniques employed in Early Iron Age China and sheds new light on this subject through the analysis of archaeological artefacts from two civilian cemeteries in the eastern part of the Guanzhong Plain (Shaanxi), dated to the third century BC. The analytical results indicate that both solid-state and liquid-state decarburisation were employed for soft iron production in this area during the Late Warring States period. The methodology employed in this paper, based on slag inclusion analysis, also provides a more systematic approach to differentiating soft iron production techniques in future archaeometallurgical research in China. Keywords Archaeometallurgy . Decarburisation . Chaogang . Slag inclusions . Warring States period
Introduction The production of iron in early human history followed two broad technological trajectories: the direct process, also
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-019-00921-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Kunlong Chen [email protected] 1
UCL Institute of Archaeology, 31-34 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PY, UK
2
Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3ER, UK
3
School of Archaeology and Museology, Peking University, Beijing 100080, China
4
Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology, Xi’an 710043, China
5
Institute of Historical Metallurgy and Materials, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing 100083, China
known as bloomery iron smelting, and the indirect process, which involved the production of cast iron followed by decarburisation. These two technical procedures led to widely different technical processes to obtain malleable soft iron. In the direct process, iron ore is reduced in the solid state at temperatures around 1200 °C, in the form of metallic iron particles that coalesce through the liquid slag to form a low carbon iron b
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