Roman metallurgy
This included Italy and its islands, Spain, Macedonia, Africa, Asia Minor, Syria and Greece; by the end of the Emperor Trajan's reign, the Roman Empire had grown further to encompass parts of Britain, Egypt, all of modern Germany west of the Rhine, Dacia, Noricum, Judea, Armenia, Illyria, and Thrace (Shepard 1993).
Early Italians had some access to metals in the northern regions of the peninsula in Tuscany and Cisalpine Gaul, as well as the islands Elba and Sardinia.
With the conquest of Etruria in 275 BC and the subsequent acquisitions due to the Punic Wars, Rome had the ability to stretch further into Transalpine Gaul and Iberia, both areas rich in minerals.
Britannia, Iberia, Dacia, and Noricum were of special significance, as they were very rich in deposits and became major sites of resource exploitation (Shepard, 1993).
By the height of the Roman Empire, metals in use included: silver, zinc, iron, mercury, arsenic, antimony, lead, gold, copper, tin (Healy 1978).
As in the Bronze Age, metals were used based on many physical properties: aesthetics, hardness, colour, taste/smell (for cooking wares), timbre (instruments), resistance to corrosion, weight (i.e., density), and other factors.
Tin Lead Iron Zinc Mercury Arsenic Phalagonia, Carmania Antimony Mytilene, Chios, around Smyrna, Transcaucasia, Persia, Tehran, Punjab, Britannia Iberia (modern Spain and Portugal) was possibly the Roman province richest in mineral ore, containing deposits of gold, silver, copper, tin, lead, iron, and mercury.
[2] From its acquisition after the Second Punic War to the Fall of Rome, Iberia continued to produce a significant amount of Roman metals.
[citation needed] Noricum (modern Austria) was exceedingly rich in gold and iron, Pliny, Strabo, and Ovid all lauded its bountiful deposits.
By 15 BC, Noricum was officially made a province of the Empire, and the metal trade saw prosperity well into the fifth century AD.
The use of cupellation, a process developed before the rise of Rome, would extract copper from gold and silver, or an alloy called electrum.
In order to complete some of the more complex metallurgical techniques, there is a bare minimum of necessary components for Roman metallurgy: metallic ore, furnace of unspecified type with a form of oxygen source (assumed by Tylecote to be bellows) and a method of restricting said oxygen (a lid or cover), a source of fuel (charcoal from wood or occasionally peat), moulds and/or hammers and anvils for shaping, the use of crucibles for isolating metals (Zwicker 1985), and likewise cupellation hearths (Tylecote 1962).
They could easily have adapted the technology to crush ore using tilt hammers, and just such is mentioned by Pliny the Elder in his Naturalis Historia dating to about 75 AD, and there is evidence for the method from Dolaucothi in South Wales.
[10] In addition, coal was mined in some regions to a fairly large extent: almost all major coalfields in Roman Britain were exploited by the late 2nd century AD, and a lively trade along the English North Sea coast developed, which extended to the continental Rhineland, where bituminous coal was already used for the smelting of iron ore.[11] The annual iron production at Populonia alone accounted for an estimated 2,000[12] to 10,000 tons.
This is not to suggest that the creativity of individual artisans did not continue; rather, unique handcrafted pieces were normally the work of small, rural metalworkers on the peripheries of Rome using local techniques (Tylecote 1962).
Three particular objects produced en masse and seen in the archaeological record throughout the Roman Empire are brooches called fibulae, worn by both men and women (Bayley 2004), coins, and ingots (Hughes 1980).
These cast objects can allow archaeologists to trace years of communication, trade, and even historic/stylistic changes throughout the centuries of Roman power.
In the case of Noricum, there is archaeological evidence of freemen labour in the metal trade and extraction through graffiti on mine walls.
From the formation of the Roman Empire, Rome was an almost completely closed economy, not reliant on imports although exotic goods from India and China (such as gems, silk and spices) were highly prized (Shepard 1993).
