Despite being affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, IBERIRON project has been successful in producing a corpus of data that results in an unprecedented overview of the technological practises on the working of iron of significant cultural segments of the indigenous populations in the Iberian Peninsula in Pre-roman times, especially in the period comprising the 5th to the 3rd centuries BCE. It has also been successful in generating a series of protocols and good practices for the study of archaeological iron artifacts, including the generation of a Data Model for its use in databases and Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI).
The project has collected and analysed more than then 60 samples of archaeological ferrous artifacts from five archaeological sites, significantly increasing the amount of metallographical analyses of pre-roman peninsular ferrous weapons and creating an incipient new corpus of other iron-based artefacts of the same period, comprising tools and structural elements.
The analytical characterization of the materials has provided insight not only into the chaîne opératoire involved in the fabrication of technologically complex artefacts but also into the production methodologies of iron and steel, giving subsequent rise to questions about craft organization as well as putting into question some of the funerary practises involving incineration and pre-depositional treatment of the weaponry.
It has been established that high-carbon steel was most probably produced during the smelting process and regularly used to improve the mechanical performance of weapons, but that it was at the same time a scarce resource, a sought after valuable commodity and element of exchange. This opens new exciting lines of research on the power relationships that would exist around the control of the resources required to obtain it in the shape of raw materials or specialized technological knowledge.
The intentionality of some technological practises has been put in question. The process of carburization that aims at superficially turning iron into steel to improve the mechanical properties of the manufactured objects seems not to be a stablished technical procedure. Also, the generation of patinas or coatings of black, shiny magnetite using heat seems to be accidental in the case of weapons blades, but it was probably intentional in the case of decorated iron objects, like weapons scabbards, pommels or guards. In all cases, further investigation based on targeted sampling is planned.
The project has also taken advantage of favourable circumstances to explore the possibility of incorporating into the protocols and good practises the use of increasingly available non-invasive techniques, in particular the use of Time-of-Flight Neutron Diffraction (ToF-ND) for the study of archaeological ferrous objects.
The work and results of IBERIRON have been disseminated in several conferences and events, included such a landmark event as is the “Archaeometallurgy in Europe 2019” conference in Miskolc (Hungary), and we expect to publish the overall results of the project in two to three academic journals over the next year, as well as the specific cases of the main sites that have provided samples for study shortly after.
