Individual Exercise #1.doc
Posted at Feb 16/2011 01:36AM:
aeber: Participating in the Ore and fuel Group exercise helped me gain a better understanding of the smelting process. The activity forced my group to take into account all of the factors involved in building such an operation. Water was the very first component we took into consideration when choosing our site. We decided that water power was the most efficient approach to running a bloomery with three people. Many of the articles we have read for class have described furnaces operated by hand bellows and such operations seem to require a tremendous amount of labor. Given our small number of people we didn’t have much of a choice in locating ourselves near a water source for power. Locating our operation on a stream immediately forced us to consider the location of other smelters and the competition for resources. This competition for resources was what made my group locate our operation as close to the mineral resources as possible. We could have located ourselves near a bog and harvested bog ore, but such a resource would have been affected greatly by other smelting operations in the area. Both the amount of ore they harvested and their operations effect on the environment would have affected our own operation. In search of independence we located our smelting operation on the Jordan River between Iron Mountain and Mount Matumbla. Our research showed that both mountains could supply our operation with a steady supply of wood and iron rich minerals; both vital resources. This exercise required us to take into account all the variables involved in a smelting operation and to prioritize. Even discussing each group’s strategy contributed to helping me understand how complex such operations truly were.
