ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the two main types of furnace of the Roman period: the Ashwicken shaft furnace and the Minepit Wood developed bowl furnace. The composition of the majority of Roman irons, apart from proving that they are indeed wrought iron and not cast iron, seems unexciting. The bulk of the Roman smithing hearths are no more than holes in the ground, that is bowl hearths in the true sense. Artis thought that it might have been a Roman iron-smelting furnace for the production of cast iron, and shows iron slag issuing from the furnace. A number of individual blooms of iron have been found, and an examination of the Corbridge and Catterick beams shows the iron to be mostly a low-carbon iron with some entrapped slag. Generally, if the corrosion has not gone too far, the product is the magnetic oxide, magnetite, and the object is identifiable by its magnetic nature, even if all the original metal has disappeared.
