INDIAN IRON AND STEEL, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO SOUTHERN INDIA 83 The Indian subcontinent has had a vibrant and longstanding tradition of iron and steel working. The famed Delhi iron pillar, with a Gupta era inscription (late 4 th century to early 5 th century AD), stands testimony to the skills of early Indian iron smiths and is the earliest surviving large-scale iron forged work in the world, aptly described as the ‘rustless wonder’ due to its resistance to corrosion (Anantharaman 1997). It remains one of the best known cultural emblems of the Indian subcontinent, as well as being one of the earliest ironworks to have been studied from an archaeometallurgical or scientific perspective: Robert Hadfield’s initial 1912 examination indicated it to be high-purity iron (one of the earliest identifications of high carbon steel was reported by Marshall in 1951, of three sword blades with 1.2-1.7% C from Taxila, in modern day Pakistan (ca 5 th c. BC-1 st c. AD)). Another celebrated object of study in the region has been the Indian wootz steel: a high-grade, high-carbon steel known from travellers’ accounts to have been made in the southern part of India from the 16 th -17 th centuries onwards, and widely traded to make the fabled Damascus sword blades. This particular material has been described as one of the four outstanding metallurgical achievements of antiquity Smith (1963). As pointed out by Smith (1960), the Oriental Damascus steel blade, believed to have been forged of Indian wootz steel of a high carbon content of 1.5-2%, with a typical ‘watered silk’ pattern, was one of the first to have been studied under the microscope. The properties of wootz, or Damascus steel, were enthusiastically investigated and debated during the 19 th and 20 th centuries by several European scientists, including Faraday. These studies led to certain significant innovations and discoveries such as the development of alloy steels (Srinivasan and Ranganathan 2004). There has been a rich body of writing by European travellers related to the observance of steel-making practices by crucible processes. For example, Voysey (1832) documented steel producers in parts of Andhra Pradesh, falling under the Nizam’s dominions and corresponding to the districts of Telangana while Buchanan (1807), travelling in the provinces of Mysore after the fall of Tipu Sultan, also noted steel production by local communities. Ananda Coomarawamy (1956) was able to observe the making of crucible steel in the Kandyan region of Sri Lanka as recently as the 1950’s. The Indian subcontinent provides a thriving ethnographic record of blacksmithing practices and surviving evidence of iron smelting activities; primarily via the Agarias communities, although these communities are increasing marginalized. In the past century new insights have emerged concerning the diverse contributions of the Indian subcontinent to metallurgy. For example, active programs of archaeometallurgical research in Sri Lanka have pointed to the unusual use of wind-powered linear furnaces for iron smelting (Juleff 1996). Although more systematic archaeometallurgical and archaeological research is warranted in many parts of the Indian subcontinent in order to achieve a clearer picture of the development of iron and steel, recent finds and studies have thrown promising new light on several aspects. In the iron smelting ‘bloomery process’ a solid state iron bloom was produced, whereby the reduction of ore to iron metal took place at a temperature sufficient to reduce the ore, below the melting point of iron. Bloomery iron has a low carbon content, below about 0.04%, which produces wrought iron after the smithing process. However, in the blast furnace technology, which the Chinese mastered during the latter part of the first millennium BC (Wagner 1999) higher temperatures and more reducing conditions were reached, resulting in the formation of cast iron with higher carbon contents (up to 2-4%) – although this is a rather brittle product. Crucible steel has an intermediary composition between that of wrought iron and cast iron, of about 1-2% carbon. This characterises it as an ultra-high-carbon steel with properties of high ductility for forging and, in comparison to cast iron, high impact strength and reduced brittleness, making it highly suitable for weapons. An interesting aspect of the research relating to iron and steel from the Indian subcontinent has been the question of the reported production of wootz, or higher carbon crucible steel, particularly from parts of southern India. Also crucial to the overall understanding of the development of ferrous metallurgy in South Asia is the evidence for a diversity of production mechanisms; best exemplified by studies from Sri Lanka establishing the presence of a novel technique of wind powered iron smelting using linear furnaces, which is datable from around the mid to late first millennium BCE (Juleff 1998). Experimental reconstructions of such wind- powered techniques demonstrated that such furnaces were Indian Iron and Steel, with special reference to southern India Sharada Srinivasan