 Maewn coffie ar y cwmhreg wydd yn meddwl ei ysgol. Ac mae'n meddwl. Mae gennym ar hyn o'r pethau amser. Mae ei sefydlu i'r gyda chi i chi'n meddwl i'r cadwe yn gweithio. Mae'r cwrdd wedi chi wedi cefnod am yma i chi i'r cyfan. Ndew i chi'n tro i chi. Mae'n unrhyw fath, gyda chi'n ffniell hwn yn arhwyng. Felly, fair geisio y cwrdd wedi Llennidog rhes. Felly, mae'n ddysgu. Felly mae fyddwn sy'n fwyaf gwirio, mae'n fwyaf. Mae'n meddyliau tithin. Yn ymddangos. Tithin yn erbyn o'r bwysig yw'r cyffredinol, a phryd ei hunain â Exeter, i'r Brytyn, south-west Brytyn, ..a llifos dechrauwr ar y dechrau ac yn y casyn. Rwyf amgylchedd ar y llifos dechrau ar y teulu... ..ais oes cof Technoedd sydd amsysgol a hollanaundau... ..y ffordd arall y ffwrdd cyllid... ..y ffwrdd ar amser yr Ironworking yn ni... ..y Fyrdd Ndw gyllidell. I ran y ddweud yw Professor Dzyliun Dglyll... Who, in Exeter, was a great friend and colleague of somebody here who worked for many years, she was a graduate student under my supervision. Working on the same material. And the work that Julian Julia and Tin Tin were working on on the same topic of historical erd very early iron-working was in the neighbouring area. Wel, dyma'r ddau i Felma Lowe, yr edrych yr adroddiadau yma, allan ymlaenoli ar y ddechrau yma, byw'n gofyn i'r ddweud. Dyma'r ddod, felma Lowe yn ystod am y ddechrau'r phoesfyrdd a'r ddod i'r ddod am y ddod i'r ddod i'r ddod, byddai'r ddod i'w ddod i'r ddod, ddochymus, ysgol, a'r ymwneud, all yr ymwneud yn Berkley. A'r tyntyn i'r ysgol i'r weithio Chelsi yn ystod o'r tyn o'r cyfnod o'r ffordd yma i'r ffordd fel Mynd i'r brif, JB, yn mynd i'r ymwneud. Oh, sorry, I say no, got the, excuse me, of course this is Syrwyrs, this is Selma was working on modern research in the 1980s, so obviously this is Selma's son, so they've been working and preparing the archive for storage and for reanalysis and for re-contextualising the material with the new material that that Tintin and Jillian Duleff have been working on in the neighbouring area. So that's really giving you a context of what Tintin is doing here, we hope that he'll be back, if not in Berkeley at least in the United States as a post-doc in the near future to continue the work and to finalise the work and the reuse of Selma's archive, which would be wonderful. So I would also like to tell you that he's very interested in heritage in general, ethnoarchaeology of iron, but also heritage and has a non-profit, I think is it a non-profit? It's a for-profit, one of those for-profits for social good companies in which he, if you ever in Calcutta he will take you around the historic buildings of 17th century, 18th century Calcutta built by the European colonists, so you can have, or imperialist I should say, so you can have one of his tours, his audio tours and actual walking tours around the city, I think they would be lovely, I'd like to go to Calcutta for that. So anyway, let's welcome Tintin here, he'll be here for a few more days but if any of you wanted to talk more about what he's doing but right now let's welcome him to give him his talk, pre-industrial iron working in central India, a new perspective and it's from Telangana in India. Thank you very much Ruth and thanks everyone for having me here, am I audible at the back? So there's a lot to unpack, I might go over time so please someone time me if possible. Also it might look a bit everywhere all over the place because I've not included everything in it so feel free to ask questions at the end. Okay so I'll start by introducing the area in India so we're working in central India so in this part of India which is, which earlier was a part of a big state called Andhra Pradesh but very recently while I was doing my PhD research it was divided into two states. Telangana is the new state that came out of this new political arrangement and by northern Telangana I mean these four districts of Telangana state and you can see this river here. This is the Godavari River which is basically the main river that provides water for every culture and everything in the semi arid area and our research or my PhD research focuses mainly in this district here and this district here so it's basically equally divided by on both sides by the river but the landscape is different. So in the south here the landscape is more agrarian, more villages, less hills, sporadic distribution of hills and more fields and stuff. In the north here it's mostly dense forests and most of my sites here and the iron smelters with whom I worked they live inside the tiger reserve so there was an issue of accessibility. But the sites here in the forests are better preserved, sites in the habitation area and more inhabited areas are not unfortunately. So I'll put the region in context to the whole of central India. So this is where my two main towns are in my region. This is the river that's flowing through there. So Adilabad and Karimnagar are two district headquarters and you can see that they are at the edge of this large forest tract that goes all around central India, that green patch. And this one here is actually a plateau which we call Chodronagpur Plateau which is like a very wide tabletop surrounded by forests. And these things, this is in the north of this forest, forest tract, northern edge in Netharheart where I did some work with the tribal iron smelters where there are evidence, clear evidence of iron smelting. This is Keongar in Orissa which is towards the eastern most extent of the forest tract and here there are also colonial records, recollections and stuff about iron smelting although no one directly studied the area yet. Bastar here, the very center of this forest area, also has colonial memoirs about iron smelting tribes living there as well as there is one ethnographic study done in the 1940s by Varier Elwyn with an iron smelting tribe called Agarria's. And then you can see these are my study areas which is towards the end, the southern edge of this forest area. So now what really interests me in the future is to see how technology travels through the forest tract because we know because of the recent insurgency issues in the forest that the Maoist insurgents were travelling using the old pathways through the forest to travel from here to here and they were evading the police and the military and everyone. So we know that there are old pathways, the paths that exist and they are still active and we are pretty sure that technology and people use these pathways quite a lot. So we would like to see how the interaction built up in the past as we go along with the research project. So I'll give you a basic idea of how Telangana looks, my study area looks. So this is in Karimnagar as I said it's mainly sporadic distribution of low hills like these as well and it's mostly cultivated and agrarian villages, big agrarian villages with evidence of iron smelting very close to these hills and also the edges of different villages. And on the other side of the river, on the northern side of the river it's mainly dense forests like these. This is inside a tiger reserve with very good evidence of continuous iron smelting for at least from the medieval period. There are earlier records but we are not allowed to collect samples and date them by the ASI and the local forest authorities. So we don't have any dates but from Thelma's research we know that the dates go back to 1600s from this area. So the ore sources, there are two types of ores in my study area and the area where Jill and we studied since 2010. We mainly find outcrops of banded magnetite like these, like huge boulders of banded magnetite on the hills which contain about from 60 to 70% iron and it's very easily smeltable. And this is where most of the smelting in this area comes from banded magnetite ore. But the area that Thelma studied earlier, which is a neighbouring area, has very wide outcrops of laterite ore. So the soil colour changes dramatically if you pass on from one ear here to the other. And laterite, this ore has about 40 to 45% iron and it needs a pre-processing stage to smelt. So here the organisation of smelting was different and it involved several other communities because it was difficult to mine it and smelt it. But this research, my research do not go much into the laterite area because there is hardly any memory of laterite smelting left. Because the magnetite ore areas are mostly deep in the forests, there are some isolated communities who still recall, who still have memories, direct memories of iron smelting. From 1930s, 1940s is the latest memory of iron smelting there. And some of the iron smelters who participated in smelting in their early youth, they are still alive. Now as we go along through the villages we see very frequently huge slag heaps like these. So you can see this person here is about 5 feet 8 inches tall. So the slag heaps are normally very like one story or sometimes two story tall slag heaps. But they have been quarried away because slag is a very important building material there. They incorporate with mud to make the mud brick bind and they use it for building houses. So that is why the older slag heaps, there is very less chance that the older slag heaps would survive. So most of the slag heaps that we encounter are mostly medieval or late medieval. But they have been frequently quarried away because to build houses. In the forests we find huge areas of a series of slag heaps. So you can see this is one slag heap, this is another one, this is another one, this is another one. And there are a lot of slag heaps further down. So these were probably a series of smelting episodes. I'll explain later as we go along and probably indicate specific time periods. Like each slag heap was probably from a series of 5-10 years of intensive smelting and the community moved away and then came back later. So a little more background of the research. So the earliest written document about iron smelting in this area in Telangana comes from the VOC, the Dutch East India Company trade documents as well as a number of British documents and memoirs about the direct encounter with iron smelters and steel makers. And then there was not much research done until Telma as the UC Berkeley PhD student surveyed a neighbouring area to our research area where she found evidence of high carbon crucible steel production or wood steel as it is called. And then after her, in 2005, a local historian, Dr. S. Jaikishan, with support from the late professor Bala Subramanian from IIT Kanpur, they would survey some sites, record some sites, but not in a systematic way, but we know the locations of where these sites were and that basically attracted us at Exeter. I was a master student then with Jill and that attracted us at Exeter to apply for funding through UQRI, which is a UK-India collaboration, to do a three-month long reconnaissance survey in the area to quantify what is there in terms of our cumulative record. So basically we surveyed at that time area of 120 kilometre diameter where this circle is. The pink dots here are the places that Telma had surveyed earlier and also Dr. Jaikishan had surveyed earlier. So the pink dots represent the steelmaking and laterite smelting area, but we surveyed the magnetite smelting area from here and there is hardly any evidence of steelmaking in the magnetite smelting region. And the red triangles, these are the sites that I added later during my PhD fieldwork. So we found during the pioneering metallurgy project almost 245 locations with iron smelting evidence and that includes slag heaps and some evidence of mud brick forts where slag was incorporated within the structure and there was a slag heap nearby which was completely quarried to do that, etc. And then these were all clustered into about 120 sites. And then during my fieldwork I identified several more locations which were clustered into 10 more sites, mostly inside the forest tract there in the forests. Also during the pioneering metallurgy survey we found that it had an ethnographic element and we spoke to the local iron working community and we found there are members of the community which has direct knowledge of iron smelting. Sometimes they have indirect knowledge of iron smelting through their ancestors, but it was not very clear how much knowledge exists and if there was a specific iron smelting and steelmaking community in the area or whether other smelters and steelmakers were also blacksmiths. So this distinction was not very clear. We had hints that there might be different communities, there might be separate discrete communities but we did not really know for sure then. But also what we found is that the metallurgical tradition was very important because this goddess here is a goddess of steel. The name of the goddess is Mamai. In the steelmaking areas the blacksmiths who say that their ancestors were steelmakers, they still worshipped the goddess during the New Year festival. It's not that every iron working community that worships them, only those who claim that they have direct links with the steelmakers, they only worship the goddess. So this is a very interesting tradition that struck us during the fieldwork and we wanted to take it forward. Also we conducted several ethnographic interviews at that time because we had short time so we had to come up with a questionnaire which I personally did not like but anyway that was what we had to do to get maximum information in a short period and that also indicated a thriving tradition, iron working tradition, iron smelting tradition in the area. So this led to my PhD research and my research questions I've approached in two ways. First I wanted to understand the social context of smelting and also I wanted to understand how the iron smelting sites made sense in the landscape and whether the community, the descendants, the extent members of the smelting community could help us understand the sites in their own way because when we did the survey all these sites looked scattered and did not really make much sense except for the clear laterite magnetite divide because in the magnetite area all the sites looked very scattered without any sense and laterite area the sites looked very scattered without much sense to them. So we wanted to understand why the sites are there, where they are. So in the social context I wanted to know who the iron smelters and steel makers were and can their memory help in any way in unraveling the socio-economic organization of production in the course of my fieldwork I realized that there is almost no memory of steel making. The steel making probably had vanished by the mid 1800s when steel started to be imported from England to India and the steel became cheaper and more easily available and during my course of my PhD I found out that there are several forest laws which were implemented there in the area specifically to stop steel makers from accessing charcoal so that the English steel is sold. There is a market for English steel. Then I wanted to know if iron smelting, steel making and blast smithing represent discreet specialized craft traditions and therefore whether these iron smelters, steel makers and iron workers were different communities which was not very clear during our pioneering metallurgy fieldwork because whoever you will ask they will say that we are just iron workers. We are from that caste and that's all, that's it. They won't even try to talk about anything else. Then I wanted to know how they are placed in the local rural space in Telangana both in terms of social space and the social hierarchy as well as physical space where the iron smelters are located in terms of the villages or in terms of the entire landscape, how they situate themselves in terms of other, in relation to the smelting sites as well. The landscape aspect I wanted to know why the smelting sites are there where they were because it did not make much sense during the pioneering metallurgy project also what kind of distribution of archaeological evidence of smelting and steel making tell us about the nature of the organization of production so whether the evidence is similar throughout, whether it is a uniform distribution of the evidence and if not, if there are differences in what can, whether these were done by different communities with different organizations of production. Also, can an ethnographic study of the extent iron smelting community help in understanding the production landscape? Can we take the iron smelters who are still alive and who still recall have memory of smelting? Can we take them to these smelting sites or can they take us to the smelting sites and try to help us understand the sites from their perspective because we will probably understand better if they explain the site to us. So the study area closely resembled the one followed in the pioneering metallurgy during the pioneering metallurgy survey and over three long seasons of fieldwork so in UK you know probably the PhDs are four year long and you get three years of funding and the fourth year you have to submit so it's not much time. So three seasons of fieldwork which is most of the three years I work closely with 74 traditional iron workers 13 of whom had directly participated in the iron smelting in their youth and they are like among these 13 by the time my PhD finished five or six of them had already passed away. So the knowledge is going on. Many of the rest said that they have recollection about smelting from what they heard from their grandparents or parents. The survey methods included a sustain ethnographic study through unstructured or semi-structured interview I preferred the previous one because we would then strike a friendship and then gradually segue into smelting and then people will be willing to show us more sites and talk more about themselves with the interlocutors and then a frequent site visits with them to understand the sites through their eyes. So we would just go to the, we will ask them to take us to the sites and explain what happened where, how this organization of space happened in the site, who was participating in each and every activity and what they were doing because they were among the 13 elders, there were at least two smelters who had a limp and where their job was to sit beside the furnace and supervise the furnace making process. So they did not know how charcoal was made but they had the best description of how a furnace would be made because they were supervising it. So each and everyone had their own roles and we wanted each of them to tell us what they did and how they have seen everything organized. Okay, so this brings us to the problem of community. So mudda cymru, mudda means bloom and cymru means ironwork, blacksmith. So the mudda cymru is a community of iron smelters. That's what the community term is in telling. So a smith that makes bloom. But cymru, only cymru is a blacksmith. So when we will ask someone who has, who had direct link to iron smelting they will say, oh no but we are not from this community. We are from this one. This community does not exist. That's a myth. So that you must have read somewhere and it's not true. Now the fact that they were saying that and the fact that I have known from colonial writings and also the local Dr Jai Kishon's work that mudda cymru definitely was a distinct community and the fact that they were denying it told me that there was something going on here. And it was very difficult for me in the beginning at the early stages of field work to identify the difference and to see what was actually going on. So before I go in depth I will try to explain what the current cost structure is there. So the blacksmiths and four other craft group they come under the Vishwa Barambin cost which is obviously like, which we don't see in any of the record, census records or anything until the 1930s. So this is definitely a manufactured cost, new cost group where these groups were the various village craft groups were trying to unite together at the time when their crafts were attacked, where in a crisis because of a lot of industrialization going on and all that. So they wanted to ask for a better livelihood for themselves, a better representation in politics and stuff after independence. So the Vishwa Barambin cost really the term and the identity really starts becoming big after independence when they enter democratic politics and they start appropriating the Brahmin semiotics of semiotics of Brahmin identity and say that we were Brahmins too but the Brahmins at some point in the past kicked us out and we are, I mean, just like how cost histories work. So they show that they are persecuted Brahmins so far and now they are time to take back the thing. So the blacksmiths of very much form, the comer is very much form, a part of this Vishwa Barambin cost at present. So everyone would say that we are Khmeris and also our cost is Vishwa Barambin and we are BCD, Backward Class B, which gives them a lot of the community, a lot of access, a lot of resources and they would fight to keep their status. So that's what the political fights are then and there. So if you take a closer look, all of these five groups, they worship Vera Brahmin the Swami, this person, who is a patron demigod of the cost and who is believed to have led a social movement against the Brahmins in the 17th century and the members of the cost were sacred thread like the Brahmins and there is also a thread ceremony every year so they change the sacred thread every year during the new year and most importantly there are temples dedicated to the demigod, the Brahmins are not allowed so they worship themselves, they have their own priest group that does the worship, the Brahmins are not allowed anywhere near the temples and they perform their identity in similar ways, almost identical ways by observing the same festival and almost identical rituals as the Brahmins so they would be taking vegetarian diet sometimes of the month like the new moon as opposed to the Brahmins full moon because they want to show the difference and also they would have their own days, ritual days, festival days where they would be eating vegetarian diet and just try to access the Brahmins semiotics, the Brahmins identity basically. The cost associations that are there also propagate a unity among all crop group and seek a better access to resources and power in the cost hierarchy through democratic political pathways is what I explained in the earlier slide. The Camari and the Warlord are blacksmith and the carpenter communities generally consider cash transactions impure and sinful and they would only accept payment in crops from a traditionally fixed set of clientele in the village. This is even going on today when there is less and less crop available to give away as prestation payment because the farmers, the government is giving a better incentive if you give the crop to the government. The farmers are doing that and that is why the blacksmiths and the carpenters are still refusing to take cash payment and that is causing them their craft to decline but they are still holding on to this purity ritual and those who mention the smelters, the members of the smelting community who say that they have direct links with the smelting community they also perform all these identity rituals and they also insist that work only with crop and not cash and everything. This made me start peeling off the homogeneity that was there for the Camari, the unified blacksmith identity and I looked through census data, I looked through memoirs, colonial documents and how these groups talk about themselves in the census because the older census, the early census where these groups were required to say who they were because now after independence talking about caste is not legal in India so you don't know what caste they are saying they are but the colonial census the census enumerators would ask you what caste you are and many groups were trying to invent their identity by saying they are a certain caste. I see if you are probably familiar with Nick Dirx's work about he talks about this in some extent. So going back to the census data and back to their memories, memories of the iron working communities who I worked with, by an early 1900s this Camari identity would look would not exist basically. So some were agricultural tools forger who call themselves Camaris of course. Some forged stuff for the tori tappers who would obviously wanted to take payment in cash because they would not be paid in tori. Tori is a palm wine. So they would not be paid in bottles of tori. They just take cash and also all the other groups the scissor makers, sword makers, ammunition makers they were all urban iron working groups and they were getting paid in cash. But only after 1930s when gradually these professions were dying out because Hyderabad was modernizing and it was becoming more integrated like modernizing getting prepared for a more modern form of like when India was moving towards independence there was more industrial products coming up industrialization was happening in big way in India. These groups were all dying out and that is when they were all coming into the Camari fold the village blacksmith fold. They were moving from the towns to the villages and they were taking up work as village blacksmith and this was also supported by the fact that the older big land holdings were also going out and the land was redistributed between distributed between smaller farmers so there were more farmer clients available in the villages. So the farmer clients needed more blacksmiths to work for them, produce agricultural tools for them so that gave them an opportunity to move back to the villages from the towns and become blacksmiths and that caused them, and that caused this huge Camari blacksmith identity to come up and if you move back to the villages and become a Camari you also have to behave like a Camari you have to wear a sacred thread you have to not take payment in cash you have to behave like them. So the one thing that made me among these group made stood out is how everyone of them talked about the smelters The smelters denied that there was a different smelting community but everyone else said that yes there was a different smelting community and they said all these things about them this is just a key word of what I heard throughout my field work so they would say they are not us, they are dirty they take money, they are of low origin they are labourers, they touch slag now slag is thought of as excrement of the furnace so if you touch it you are impure so they touch slag, they are fake Camari, they are fake blacksmiths but what really put me on the scent is that almost everyone said we don't marry them and we don't live with them and that made me look at two things that started looking at going to the villages and talking to those who have direct memory of smelting or indirect memory of smelting talking to them and taking their genealogies so maybe if no one else was marrying them they might be marrying within the community so I took pages after pages of genealogies which they permitted me to use in my research and I started looking at where these families who have direct linked to smelting they are staying in the village and I found that they were always staying at the village boundaries very close to the slag heaps or the remains of iron smelting they are not integrated with the other iron working communities in the village so if you look at the genealogies I went to the field, collected genealogies like this I mean it was more in rough form I come back home, come back to where I was staying and then I'll put them in a much fair form like this and this is just to give you one example this is the Cuchanapallee family in Tipperu means surnames or caste name so Cuchanapallee is the biggest smelting family that's still there in my study area and I have taken the genealogies for the last four generations because that's how much how far they remember and this is from different people from the same family in different villages and so the MK here is the Muddakamari so they married Muddakamari mostly you can see there's only differences here where instance they married Akamari and they married two migrant blacksmith family who came from outside so if they were marrying outside mostly and this is the case for all the genealogies that I collected if they were very rarely marrying the Kamari and that is more in the present generation where they would sneer the elders would sneer that this is a love marriage that happened that's not acceptable but most cases if they were marrying outside the community they were marrying the immigrant Marathi blacksmiths who came into the area after the 1950s and 1960s so his representation of percentage in the last four generations 87% of the marriages happened within the community with their first cousin relations and only 13% of the marriages happened outside the community now then I decided to follow the leads about where other family members live and where they were getting married to so that led me to this is for the same family led me to all of these villages and that happened with 14 other families that I collected genealogies of so that led me to a number of villages in the area where there are still members of the smelting community living there and interestingly near all of these villages within 10 km within a 10 km radius there would be a cluster of smelting sites so they are still living very close to smelting areas so I'll show you the next map so the black triangles are where the families are now the smelting families are now and the reds are smelting sites so you can see the cluster you can cluster them almost so it became a map of both where the community is and also where the sites are so following the genealogy helped me map the area in a different way and see the distribution of the sites in a different way now talking about landscape what would stump us every time is stump a cricketing word? I'm sorry if it was so what would what would really confuse us during the panoring metallurgy project is that we would see all these outcrops large hills of magnetite we would climb the hills we would go around the hills and we would find no mining evidence we know there are smelting sites but there was no mining I mean we did not find any mines any mining pit or any place where they were they were breaking the magnetite off so how were they smelting? that was a big question we did not really have any answer to that and when during my fieldwork I would repeatedly ask my interlocutors they would say well are you mad we are little people we can't climb those hills and it takes a lot of people to bring down those heavy things we have easier ways to mine we collect it in much easier way nature gave us things where we collect through which we collect ore more easily now it turned out that Carimnagar district the one that is more integrated agricultural district it was integrated into an agrarian landscape in the 13th and 14th centuries where there was a powerful kingdom which in order to improve agriculture they excavated several agrarian several canals and these canals were all connected either originated from a mainstream like this or they were connected to these scattered hills where during monsoon the rain water will come down through a canal into a reservoir like these and then this will be distributed through a network of reservoirs and villages so what the muddokameries they are figured out is that so some of the canals are still active but many most of them have been cut off and that caused older villages to vanish as well so what the muddokameries figured out is that if this monsoon brings down irons like magnetite sands magnetite sediments irons magnetite sediments from the magnetite outcrops and brings them down with them so if they could collect these sediments before the canals go in a big reservoir then they have already pre-processed, automatically processed ores which they don't have to break down, pulverize and they would be able to then put it in a furnace and smelt it much more easily so they have a name for this black sand, it's called Wooski and that became a practice so wherever there is a canal coming into a reservoir they would be going there to collect ore and there would be smelting right near it very close to it so this is a big reservoir in one of the villages, the older reservoirs that survived and near that there would be if the canal had dried out there would be still black sand deposits like this because no one has collected them for ages and this black sand is what the magnetite sand looks like that's what Wooski is and there's a huge weight difference between normal sand and the magnetite sand magnetite sand is really heavy I had collected some samples but it was confiscated in the Hyderabad airport because it went off in the metal detector and they would place what Jill calls rifles like these these are granite marked with pockets and this will be placed at the edge at the junction at the juncture of where the canals drain into the reservoir so that after a refresh monsoon the community will go and collect whatever is held there whatever gets deposited there in terms of the sand and then they will smelt right near it now when Jill visited in 1980s this is a picture from 1980s these rifles were still existent but now they have all been removed so I didn't see any of them but since I had Jill's notes and the picture I knew what they were talking about what my interlocutors were talking about so I'll give you examples of two sites this is a Timapur site in my study area which you can see this is a large slag heap which is almost a story high more than a story high and it's been partially quarried but so this is where it is here and this pink line is the main irrigation canal that was dug in the 14th century and was connected with some subsidiary canals which drained into the reserve war which then watered was used to cultivate the hinterland around here so what the members of the community here the older members told me is that they would see their elders go here and collect sand after every fresh rain every fresh monsoon rain and they would then store it for a few more days after there was enough sand collected enough whiskey collected they would then smelt it right near the village very close to where they collected the ores from this is another site where you can see that the from the hill the streams are coming down and I actually walked all these streams with this person who has direct memory of smelting so I walked all of them and you could see black sand deposits there because no one has been mining them for ages and very close to that you can see there's two smelting locations just in the village boundary now in for the forest sites it was a bit different because in the forest area there was a large range of hill that passes through the northeast of the area rather than small sporadic ranges small ranges of hills and also the forest area was never incorporated in the agrarian base so there was no planned canals there were no planned agricultural canals so what they moved the camera is there and that's why the settlements are all towards the edges of the forest and the smelting sites are inside the forests so what these smelters would do here is they would go to the forest during monsoon like after fresh rains every fresh rain they would collect they would know where the depressions were in the streams seasonal streams and they would collect whisky the black sand from those depressions and they would smelt right near it smelting sites huge remains of slag heaps like these and also some spread really well spread out slag heaps like these which are flattened more recently so this is one of the forest one of the accessible and almost intact forest site this is where temporary habitation was for the smelters and these are all the seasonal streams coming from a hill which is outside the picture here and there are depressions where they collected ore from and they would smelt it right near where they collected ore from and these sites were also very close to clusters of the tree that they used for to make charcoal and this tree which they locally call cendra so cendra tree just it grows in clusters in the forest and the smelters knew where the clusters were and they would move from one cluster to the other they would exploit the cluster completely and they would let the cluster grow back so they would not come back to that cluster before 10-15 years how long it takes for the cluster to grow back and they would move on to the next cluster and then they would come back after 10-15 years to see if the cluster has grown back and then they use the cluster again so they were always moving through the forest and I have a hunch that each of these melting sites slag-eeps or a series of slag-eeps were created up for each of the divided by time when they came back and re-smelted they put the slag somewhere else and then when they came back again after 10-15 years they would put the slag somewhere else but very close in the landscape and in there you would also see because these sites are more or less intact you would see remains of furnaces like these this is probably this is a furnace base supported by granite and in this places where the furnace is now packed with slag and there are a lot of tapped slags found here which is probably where the slag-tapping channel was but we are not allowed to do an excavation by the forest authority so we could not dig and we had forest tracker with us always keeping an eye on us so so organizational production it was different in both in different areas so entirely kin-based production in Adilabad in the forest areas but because due to the sporadic distribution of hills and therefore dispersed accessibility of ore the production agrarian plane of Karim Nagar was not entirely community based so I'll explain it more in the next couple of slides so in Adilabad in the forest area the furnace construction or collection processing, charcoal making everything was done by the community and then smelting was done by a group of six member team where it was a mix level experience so there were some apprentices who manned the bellows and put charge into the furnace and they would be supervised by at least two or three senior smelters and then the bloom was refined by cutting in half and constant hammering at a smithing hearth and then the bloom was equally divided between all the participants in smelting and then each smelter sold a portion of the bloom that they got to a nitrogen businessman who would then take it to the markets and sell it in the markets and the remaining portion of the bloom was sold to their farmer clients who were required to buy the bloom from them and then give it back to them as some sort of ritual arrangement to forging agriculture implement which the farmers would then buy against crop so it looks very round about in the in Carimnagar in the more agrarian landscape the furnace construction or collection processing of charcoal was done by hired labourers because the landscape was dispersed and sources of charcoal and everything was very much very dispersed so the community needed to hire labourers probably from the local like mostly from the local tribal community who were in the same social fringes as the smelting community to do this work for them and then they were supervised by a smelter and then the smelting was done by a group of hired labourers to operate the bellows feed the church to the furnace etc and under the supervision of two or three experienced smelters and then the labourers were paid in cash sometimes in kind but very rarely and the bloom was sold to the Saucar or the itinerant businessman who would give them advances and the Saucar would in turn sell the bloom in the regional market which is same as the previous one but then if they had a farmer had farmer clients the farmers would have to buy the bloom from the market and bring it back to them and then they would forge the implement and then get paid by cash so it's very roundabout arrangement so they were trying to both be smelters and blacksmiths like rich blacksmiths are there any evidence of control? the smelting sites that are located near the steel making areas in the laterite zone they have mudbrick enclosures like this where the owners of these enclosures of this land they own this land for generations and they told at least a few of them told me during my survey that their great-great-grandparents would bring iron smelters there with incentives and they would be made to smelt iron iron and they would collect a tax from each furnace based on what and also collect a tax from what they sold basically so the production was much more controlled near the steel making area because steel was probably more more prestige more valuable item and iron smelted in the laterite area was one of the primary ingredients for steel but other than that there is no evidence of any direct control at least there is no memory of any direct control and no archaeological evidence in terms of enclosures and stuff about any direct control and now so I would want to end with by showing the how the sites are vanishing and how the landscape is changing which makes it imperative to really keep on doing this research before everything vanishes and this is the site of Malapur in 2009 you can see this is a hill and it was connected to the nearby tank through canals and from where they collected the ore to smelt here in 2009 2014 you can see part of the hill has been quarried away and there are no connections with the tank and the tank was gradually drying and drying out and then in 2016 at the very end of my field season you can see almost all of the hill is gone so if anyone and probably now and you would probably not even know there was a hill there apart from memory local memory so if you go there and site to site now or a few years later the landscape would not make much sense because there is no hill that is connected to a canal and that drains into a pond from where the samples were collected and this is happening very frequently everywhere in Telangana because it has become a new state and there was a lot of funding going in to develop infrastructure and everything new cities are coming up and all that so that makes it really important to both work on what Thelma saw in 2000 sorry in 1970s and 80s and what we found when the sites were still there especially outside the forest areas forest sites would probably be safe or hopefully but yeah so yeah that's I'm sorry thank you for having me here so any questions yes so are the furnaces all the same type and size in general they are pretty uniform or are there different sizes and varieties of furnaces there are different sizes the furnaces in the forest sites are normally smaller because I think because of the vegetation around and all that but the furnaces in the village sites in the more agrarian area they were normally 7 to 8 feet high so there are memories that you have to go up with a ladder to feed the furnace and stuff so they are different based on again this divide between the forest area and a more agrarian landscape I'll ask you about sort of how this fits into the history of of iron and iron smelting still working in that part of India in general when are the earliest when does this whole industry start so probably from the early historic which is like third fourth century we find evidence of iron and megalithic burials but those burial sites or megalithic burial sites do not corroborate with any smelting sites nearby probably because all the slag has been quite away for building because this is a cultural practice to use slag as building material and it seems that it has been there for quite some time yeah a long time so was this part or was this iron working was that common throughout India or was this really a center of it so this was a center so this is probably one of the various areas where two types of work were very close to each other where the transport is possible and all that yeah that's interesting that I hadn't realized that it's two completely different kinds of sources of iron where they are right next to each other yeah that's I mean look at the landscape when you cross over to the left it's completely right and it's very dark in the hour's time area it's all the magnetite it's great so it gave me a real picture of your research and the others as well nice presentation, very visual and very startling thank you you shouldn't slide with the different families and their territories are there are there exclusive access to the resources in those territories that you learned from communication that's something that archaeologists would be able to recognize give that access to getting knowledge you mean local local knowledge but there was a map where it showed the villages, the families and their resources this one right or the cluster clusters I think I think part of what you're asking is that these were at the local community so they the male side of family it would be the one that would have the control of that area so they basically passed access to that zone and also the knowledge about where to exactly mine or from and stuff and where to put these the bifolts, the prenecoifolts in that that was very strictly controlled was there anything about them that archaeologists would recognize about access to you can't see the site but they're all basic they look up on that the site is the same and you'll see the scenic maps or the medieval aggregations but then without this local knowledge you would not know how all of these fit together because we were on the hills on the hills on mining sites there were no mining sites so the end of the magnetite rock you showed that straight out of the rock that's a magnetite that's where it's where it's broken up the laterite iron that's not mine either I think the laterite is mine but the problem is that the laterite zone has become really urbanized and the I did not find any significant memories there there are some some publications around which say that there were members of steel making but during my research I did not know it would be very difficult to do and there's no archaeological evidence so those areas used to be forests so they were mining pits I'm sure in the forests because I've studied a simple laterite mining area in in Netherland which is on top of this forest area and there I know that the mine from they know where the veins of the laterite are the region where the veins are to say that it's the color of the sheep's liver and then if you see that stone and collect it and I'm sure something like that going on here too so you guys give us some clean energy that's great that is I'll see if there's enough material so I'm going to get killed and stuff to get out it's unbelievable it's great well thanks so much it's wonderful