Iron smelting in early medieval Europe: a comparative approach to craft specialization Florin Curta 2026, Across Frontiers and Changing Worlds. Archaeological Perspectives on Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

https://www.academia.edu/180105560/Iron_smelting_in_early_medieval_Europe_a_comparative_approach_to_craft_specialization Despite claims to the contrary, the early Slavic society was not characterized by low-level crafting and lack of craft specialization. A case in point is the archaeological evidence of smelting on sites in southern Romania, the region where 6th-century sources locate the Sclavenes. A comparison of smelting operations at the scale of the entire European continent between ca. 450 and ca. 800 demonstrates that smelters in Wallachia worked with technologies and know-how comparable to those in use at that time in Merovingian Austrasia, as well as in the Middle Volga region. While smelting sites in Merovingian Austrasia seem to have involved attached specialists working under the control of local elites, in the Middle Volga region smelters lived along with local elites in strongholds. Large "service settlements" of smelters are also known for the 7th and 8th centuries from the western and southern parts of the Carpathian Basin that were at the time within the Avar khaganate. Similarly large smelting sites are also known from Right-Bank Ukraine for the second half of the 7th century and they have been part of the settlement reorganization involved in the rise of the Khazar khaganate. Smelting is also attested in the 6th-century Balkan provinces of the early Byzantine Empire, but production seems to have been relatively small and organized in retainer workshops. In Wallachia, the organization of production during the 6th and 7th centuries fits the model of nucleated corvée, which implies both craft specialization and social complexity.