Date sent:  23-JAN-1996 11:16:10
Alasdair>
        What you found could very well be bloomery slag, the description
you give fits most of the criteria that such stuff generally follows. My
experience with the stuff comes from industrial excavations of 19th century
iron forge operations- we have any number of examples of both blooms and
slag. Believe me, one gets fully aquainted with it when digging.
        Slag can take many forms, from what you described, greyish, burnt,
vitrifed in places, to forms that basically look like lava rock, for lack
of a better descriptor, ranging from black, to rustish brown. I've even
seen iron slag that glassy-green in color, almost completely vitrified-
although this may be the result of workers tossing in items into the forge
in operation, and not from the content of the ore used.
        A good clue for identification, especially if it's iron slag, is if
it has any rust on the piece at all, or a high iron content. Another,
sometimes more telling clue is density. Slag, more often than not,
looks more dense than it actually is, because the slag is either wholly
composed of those bubbles you mentioned, or because the iron content of the
ore is the heaviest part of it, and slag is the waste part of the ore that
get separated out of the ore during forging. In other words, the lighter
stuff gets removed... the object of the forging process.
        Your description of texture is about right, too. While smooth slag is
out there, slag generally is rough with the texture of lava rock- again, these
are very rough generalizations. Truth to tell, I never thought this much
about the nature of slag... generally on the dig I was on at this forge
site, someone would ask me what a piece was- rock, rusty bit of iron
(tagable and bagable) or slag. Rocks got thrown into the refuse/sifted
matrix pile along with the slag. I think I gave roughly half a second of
thought in most cases to each piece. Perhaps I'm incriminating myself- the
PI of the dig is on this list. ;) When I say lava rock, I mean the stuff
used in gas barbeque grills... relatively light for its overall volume,
and porous.
        Lastly, there's the question of association. Do you have evidence
of a iron or other metal forging opertaion on-site? It could be feasible to
say that a small-scale forge could cart or move its slag and waste somehow
to be dumped at in the slave quarter? Is a forge nearby? It may
be a good idea to poke around the forge enough to find some slag from there,
and compare the two... if you can find such a feature.
        That's about it... feel free to direct questions back to the list,
or to me directly. Hope it helps.
 
Regards,
Jason
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jason Menard                       "Never doubt that a small group of
Depts. of Anthropology & History    thoughtful, committed citizens can change
Computing Support Lab Staff         the world; indeed, it's the only thing
SUNY Plattsburgh, Plattsburgh, NY   that ever does." - Margaret Mead
 
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