Copper smelting

Smelting is the process of applying heat to ore in order to extract a base metal. In the case of copper, combining tin and/or arsenic in the right proportions produces bronze, an alloy that is significantly harder than copper.

Process

Smelting is usually done using a furnace, whose design can be as simple as a pit in the ground. In this case, on of the possible processes steps are the following:

1. A small pit is dug unto the ground using an antler pick or another tool, such as a stick.

Normally, a natural draft furnace using wood, a kiln, can reach up to 1400 Celsius degrees (or 2552 Fahrenheit), while a furnace that uses fuel such as charcoal can reach temperatures up to 1600 °C degrees.

See also

• Bloomery Furnace

External links

• Prehistoric copper smelting in a pit!, ancient1580, 25 May 2012, YouTube

Further reading

• Rehder, J.E. (2006). The Mastery and Uses of Fire in Antiquity. McGill-Queen's University Press. ISBN 0773530746.

References

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Smelting, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (view authors).