ABSTRACT
Although the Iron Age did not begin north of the Alps until the eighth century Bc, occasional iron artefacts had been appearing in central and western Europe for some centuries before then. Some of these may have been made of meteoric iron; others of metal acquired by a series of exchanges from the Hittite kingdoms of Anatolia, where iron was being produced in appreciable amounts from at least the middle of the second millennium Bc, and in small quantities probably a millennium earlier. But in some cases the iron may have been produced locally, for the furnaces used to smelt copper could produce iron at only slightly higher temperatures. Indeed, if iron ores were mixed with copper ore as fluxes to increase the copper yield, metallic iron could be produced without any increase in temperature.
