IronGold and silver represent only two aspects of the strategic armoury of
available minerals. Iron, not silver or gold, was the fundamental metal of
thefirst millenniumbc. Every aspect of daily life and every kind of craft
and specialized activity involved the use of iron tools. Despite the fact
that iron was so essential to the organization of everyday life, not
everyone, it seems, had equal access to iron instruments and weapons.
Iron is among the commonest of minerals. Mineral ores containing iron,
iron-bearing sands, and bog ores are widely distributed throughout the
region. However, we do not really know how these ores were in practice
identified and experimented with. The earliest iron artefacts from Mace-
donia and from several different parts of Thrace suggest a long period of
experimentation in the earlyfirst millenniumbc, when this metal seems
to have been treated as a special kind of mineral, before it became an
alternative to bronze, and then superseded bronze for making strong and
sharp blades. Some of the earliest iron artefacts in the region come from
Thasos, where iron succeeded copper alloys and early exploitation of
gold, several centuries before the arrival of Parian settlers.^90 The know-
ledge of how to make iron blades sharp as well as strong was an asset of
real strategic value, so it is perhaps not surprising that the techniques
used to make iron blades were not widely disseminated, in contrast to the
ceramic technologies involving grey-faced pottery. The highly unstable
nature of early iron objects makes them difficult to conserve and most
excavated iron artefacts corrode before they can be properly conserved.
Few analyses of iron have been conducted in the north Aegean, but a
recent study offinds from three separate origins provides evidence of
significant differences between communities.
A type of steel, made either from carburized wrought iron, or by forging
a bloom with high carbon content, was produced at a range of sites in the
north Aegean from thefifth centurybconwards. A study area of 80 km x
50 km has produced a wealth of technological solutions to the challenges
posed by the variety of iron ores available in the north Aegean, which
display very different working properties (iron pyrites, manganese,
copper-rich iron, oxides of iron, and iron-bearing sands). The technologies
represented in the samples studied by Maria Kostoglou display little sign
2 (1976) 1: a hoard from‘Western Thrace’; Picard 2000 for a general survey of the early
coinages in the region.
(^90) Muller 2010, 216–19; cf.HMI, 13, 312–16 (iron deposits in Macedonia); Archibald
1998, 24, 66–71 on early iron-producing sites in lowland Macedonia and Thrace; Chernykh
1978 is still fundamental for comparative analysis of metal samples.
176 Thelongue duréein the north Aegean