John White wrote:

> Slag worriers might refer to the article "Historic Blast Furnace
> Slags:  Archaeological  and Metallurgical Analysis" in Journal of
> Historical Metallurgy Vol. 14, No. 2 pp. 55-64. 1980.

I would hope that the comment about "Slag worriers" was meant tongue in
cheek.  However, that John White sites an article written in 1980
demonstrates that he has not kept up with the literature. Quite a lot
has been published on slags since 1980, including a number of books.  I
can provide a bibliography for any who are interested.

For the sake of argument slag is a site specific diagnostic artifact.
When properly analyzed it can provide a great deal of information.  When
treated as the historical equivalent of fire cracked rock, it is not
worth collecting.

But, the question is not if anything has been published, but how wide an
audience it is reaching.  And until there is an awareness on the part of
archaeologists that that they are missing something it will continue to
be a small, select few.  According to a search I carried out a couple of
years ago only 41 US libraries subscribed to the Journal of Historical
Metallurgy.   This is pretty indicative of how many people read it.  At
the same time 750 libraries got American Antiquity.

As an archaeologist I feel it is necessary to read on a wide variety of
subjects, including slag.  What I read depends not only on my personal
interests, but also on the projects I am working.  Right now slag and
iron technology are important.  I can also make fairly passable stone
tools and once upon a time knew a lot about Visigothic Spain and
Anglo-Saxon England.

Over the past couple of years I have looked at the research conducted on
iron sites in the US, primarily colonial.  While some were very good,
most are riddled with incorrect statements and reach faulty
conclusions.  A reasonable generalization would be that most of the
field directors, while competent excavators, had no idea what they were
looking at, or for, and it shows in their work.  What little research
they did was confined to a few outdated and readily available secondary
sources.  Even where the project was being conducted by a university,
they did not consult with experts.  Nor do the kind of background
research that is habitual on other types of archaeological sites.  They
completely ignored what Ivor Noel Hume wrote in Historical Archaeology
(1975:161-193):

In the excavation of domestic sites, archaeological competence must be
coupled with a general understanding of the life of the period.  But
just about anything else we dig requires relevant specialized
knowledge.  I touched on this in the first chapter, but it cannot be
emphasized too often.  On a manufacturing site, we must understand the
process involved and be able to identify both the components and the
products... Some excavators may think that industrial sites are not of
major historical importance, but I would strongly disagree with them.
We live in a nation that takes pride in its technological supremacy, and
therefore the history of American technology is just as worthy of our
attention as chronicles of battles, parties, and politicians [or slaves
and gender issues].  It is a subject whose early chapters are
distressingly thin, largely because the pioneers were more concerned
with getting on with their work than with writing about it.

When I got started I didn't know very much about iron technology.  So I
contacted the experts, read what they wrote and recommended, and asked a
lot of questions.  I would encourage people working on metallurgical
sites to join the arch-metals list ([log in to unmask]).  The
members are a font of information.

In the Service of Iron ;-)
Jamie Brothers