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Sican tumi, or ceremonial knife, Peru, 850–1500 CE. Metallurgy in pre-Columbian America is the extraction, purification and alloying of metals and metal crafting by Indigenous peoples of the Americas prior to European contact in the late 15th century.
Metallurgists throughout medieval Europe were generally free to move within different regions. For instance, German metallurgists in search of rich precious metal ores took the lead in mining and influenced the course of metal production, not only in East and South Germany but also in almost all of Central Europe and the Eastern Alps.
There was no fundamental change in the technology of iron production in Europe for many centuries. European metal workers continued to produce iron in bloomeries. However, the Medieval period brought two developments—the use of water power in the bloomery process in various places (outlined above), and the first European production in cast iron.
Both texts mentioned the use of vertical stamp mills for ore-crushing. Medieval French sources of the years 1116 and 1249 both record the use of mechanised trip hammers used in the forging of wrought iron. [9] Medieval European trip hammers by the 15th century were most often in the shape of the vertical pestle stamp-mill. [10]
Although European colonialism traces its roots from the classical era, when Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans established colonies of settlement around the Mediterranean – "factories" were a unique institution born in medieval Europe. Originally, factories were organizations of European merchants from a state, meeting in a foreign place.
A major drive of the Spanish colonization of the Americas during the late 15th and 16th centuries was the discovery, production, and trading of precious metals at a time when there was a severe shortage of them. The Spanish, along with other European nations, likewise had a great desire for Chinese goods such as silk and porcelain. [13]
Early European bloomeries were relatively small, primarily due to the mechanical limits of human-powered bellows and the amount of force possible to apply with hand-driven sledge hammers. Those known archaeologically from the pre-Roman Iron Age tend to be in the 2 kg range, produced in low shaft furnaces.
A saltpetre works or nitrary [1] is a place of production of potassium nitrate or saltpetre used primarily for the manufacture of gunpowder. The saltpeter occurs naturally in certain places like the "Caves of Salnitre" ( Collbató ) known since the Neolithic.