BUCHWALD, Vagn Fabritius, 2001, Ancient Iron and Slags in Greenland, Meddelelser om Grønland: Man & Society, 26, 92 pages. Illustrated.

Metallurgist Vagn Fabritius Buchwald has published extensively on the subject of ancient iron production as it relates (or does not) to the Inuit and Norse settlement of Greenland. In so doing, he has enlarged our understanding of the sources of available iron, the scope of metal use and the impact of these cultural groups on each other. In a previous monograph, he and co-author Gert Mosdal (1985) presented a method for differentiating between meteoritic iron (from the Cape York meteor shower in northwest Greenland), telluric iron (from iron-rich basalt outcrops local to Disco Bay in west Greenland) and smelted, or wrought, iron (of European origin), based on relative nickel content and degree of structural homogeneity. "At that time," he states in his current monograph, "it could only be speculated from where the enigmatic wrought iron could come…" (p. 65). Subsequently, Buchwald and Wivel (1998) developed the slag-analytical technique to describe and identify smelted iron. In his current volume, Buchwald applies this method to the study of 76 iron objects from Greenlandic archaeological deposits related to Norse, Inuit and 18^th and 19^th century European occupations. By analyzing the chemical composition of both slag inclusions in iron artifacts and slag waste products and comparing them to iron objects from known Scandinavian contexts, Buchwald provides archaeometallurgists with an invaluable means of identifying the methods of smelted iron production, the geological and, hence, cultural, sources of the iron ore and even the stage of iron production within a particular method — all with or without the presence of the finished tools themselves. The resulting monograph is a highly technical presentation that is directed principally to archaeometallurgists, although the implications for culture contact research, especially in the Arctic, with respect to the origins of iron and the possibility of technological transfer are significant. My comments largely concern these implications. A critical review of the metallurgical science lies outside of my area of expertise. The author's central argument that iron was not produced in Greenland either from local bog ore or from European ore sources, seems gratuitous since archaeologists now concede this point, citing the lack of adequate supplies of charcoal and the absence of related archaeological features. Buchwald's contribution lies in his convincing metallurgical evidence. The monograph begins with a description of the "bloomery iron production method," known elsewhere in the literature as the "direct reduction process." This is the first point of confusion; the second relates to the method's period of use. Although Buchwald indicates (p. 5) that this is a medieval method of iron production, in fact, the only method in use during the Viking age and early medieval period (p. 8), and therefore presumably an important index marker for a Norse presence in Greenland, he subsequently contradicts this designation. On page 12, he states that the technique was in use in Denmark from 200 B.C. to 1600 A.D., a period considerably longer than the Viking-medieval time frame. On page 36 he presents evidence (in the form of a piece of Swedish fined iron) for a different process, the indirect, or blast furnace, method, which was developed ca. 1150 A.D. Buchwald states that the blast furnace method replaced the bloomery method in the 16^th century but according to an earlier publication (Buchwald and Wivel 1998) both methods were in use from 1200 to 1850 A.D. The reader is left wondering why Buchwald has linked (only) the bloomery process (only) with Norse culture in this current study. Nevertheless, the process is very well summarized in Table 1, which presents the products and the waste material formed as well as the associated …