• Korean Journal of Heritage: History & Science
• /
• v.43 no.3
• /
• pp.144-179
• /
• 2010

Investigation into iron manufacture relics has been active since 1970s, especially accelerated in 1990s across the country. Consideration of the importance of production site relics has lately attracted attention to iron manufacture relics. Methodological studies of the investigation into iron manufacture relics, however, were less made compared with those of the investigation into tomb, dwelling, or swampy place relics. It is because the process of iron manufacture is too complicated to understand and also requires professional knowledge of metal engineering. With the recognition of these problems this research is to form an opinion about how to excavate, to rearrange and classify, and to examine iron manufacture relics, based upon the understanding of the nature of iron, iron production process, and metal engineering features of related relics like slag, iron lumps and so on. This research classifies iron manufacture relics into seven types according to the production process; mining, smelting, refining, tempering, melting, steelmaking, and the others. Then it arranges methods to survey in each stage of field study, trial digging, and excavation. It also explains how to classify and examine excavated relics, what field of natural science to be used to know the features of relics, and what efforts have been made to reconstruct a furnace and what their problems were, making the best use of examples, drawings, and photos. It comes to the conclusion, in spite of the lack of in-depth discussion on application and development of various investigation methods, that iron manufacture relics can be classified according to the production process, that natural sciences should be applied to get comprehensive understanding of relics as well as archeological knowledge, and that efforts to reconstruct a furnace should be continued from the aspect of experimental archeology.