Old tech experience
Unfortunately, no photographs. They would look like gray lumps.
I was at an SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism, medieval re-enactors with a rather wide range of authenticity, ranging from the guy I'm talking about to "getting drunk and hitting on similarly drunk women is a well documented practice") event this weekend. Camping out.
Some blacksmiths had set up shop. I'd seen that kind of thing before, cool. They taught my son to forge points and leaves. Super cool. But there was a guy with a table full of gray lumps. He got tired of forging riveted mail (chain mail where every ring is riveted together) so he tried smelting. He builds old school (they stopped doing it this way 700 years ago) smelting furnaces in his back yard and refines local ore. The furnaces are made out of, well, mostly mud and straw. Makes his own charcoal to do it. Apologized that he uses the wrong kind of wood for the charcoal and the charcoal-making process he uses, while period, was not the one most commonly used for charcoal meant for smelting iron. The gray lumps: ore, slag, bloom (the splash of metal that comes out of the ore), pieces of one of the furnaces. Furnaces don't last long. He told me about how the size of the blooms changed as the Roman Empire fell - smaller markets for iron meant less resources available for big, efficient furnaces. How the ancient Greeks called iron the democratic metal, because the resources to make iron are pretty much everywhere (hey, some guy in Wisconsin makes the stuff from scratch all by himself) while copper and tin can be monopolized.
Later the blacksmiths tried to turn one of the blooms into a usable slab of iron. Got pretty close.
The smelter told us that history is really about the mechanics, the people who actually do things. Sure, kings decide where and how it gets applied, but what things are possible depends on people doing real practical things. I don't think it is meaningful to say that history is about this and not that, but the history of making things is more exciting to me than the history of telling people what to destroy. And I really liked seeing and picking up and magnet-tapping those gray lumps.
Something to remember: unlike Colonial Williamsburgh and places like that, SCA is entirely amateur. Nobody gets paid, and the only training is whatever each of us figures out on our own and then shares. The blacksmiths and smelter are doing this stuff at their own expense just for fun, except for occasionally selling something they make or a book, which I'm sure doesn't come close to being profitable. It also means the information isn't entirely reliable, but people do mention sources and encourage checking on facts.
It was a grand time for me and my son. We also did some less educational things, sitting around campfires and kiddie pools full of icewater (we both think you cool off better without the ice, because you can keep your feet in the water longer) and talking funny to each other and goofing around with lots of slightly odd people, all of us in various costumes most of the time. Did some archery, threw some axes and knives. Cooked outside. Got hot, got cold, slept badly on hard ground.
