"Iron Age America" Now On Sale

Publisher Chad Arment did a fine job of creating a cover for my book "Iron Age America," that is shown below. While all other photos of my book are in black and white on inside pages, many color photos of my archaeology and that of my associates can be viewed on my web site "America's Mysterious Furnaces."

For many years of 2000s I sent out proposal after proposal to book publishers and recieved many "thanks but no thanks" replies. I always believed our work deserved more than just a web site and that only a book could fully describe evidence we found to support our discovery of prehistoric iron furnaces in Ohio.

My claim that these furnaces are without question prehistoric is backed with evidence in the book that indicates that this type of small pit furnace was last used in Europe many years before Columbus sailed. I make this claim speaking for myself, and if others disagree they may do so.

"Iron Age America" is on sale online with both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com. I will soon install a Pay Pal button to this blog for purchase of Iron Age America books signed by the author. Also, signed books are available now $30 a copy including shipping to your address by UPS. Signing events are sought by the author in 2010. I can be reached for purchase of a signed book or for your comments via email to conner6343@sbcgobal.net. "Iron Age America" is also available via the publisher's "Coachwhip Books" web site.

Finding The Casting In The Mold

“Chase, we’re in trouble now!” That’s what I told my grandson the afternoon of Monday, June 30, 2003. We were at the Garrett site in Ross County, Ohio, in a wooded terrace just above the flood plain of the North Fork of Paint Creek, where years ago a resident of nearby village of Anderson Station found “iron furnace debris” of the same kind once made famous by amateur (and very controversial) archaeologist Arlington H. Mallery. While Mallery claimed to have found remains of pit iron furnaces of ancient design elsewhere in Ross County some 50 years ago, he never found evidence of cast iron deliberately made and then poured into a clay mold to form a finished product.

Well, that is exactly what happened when Chase dug up a big and heavy hunk of clay and handed it to me. We had come to the site to do “a shovel survey” in hopes of finally finding the top of a pit iron furnace I felt surely had to be there somewhere. We didn’t locate the furnace, but we did find an greater prize than that -- evidence of the use of a pit furnace to deliberately make molten iron for casting. Always before this, I and others who have investigated Ohio’s mysterious pit iron furnaces, found only evidence of direct reduction iron smelting. In this process, ore is smelted directly into mixed lumps of slag and wrought iron called a “bloom,” and this is forged on an anvil to squeeze out slag until the iron is pure enough to be used by a blacksmith.

Certainly, what I meant by saying “we’re in trouble” was that I was in trouble – more trouble, that is, since I’d been finding things beyond the pale of ordinary archaeology for the past 13 years in the same general area of South Central Ohio in general and Ross County, Ohio in particular. As a retired journalist who worked and a news reporter, editor and public relations man, I always sought to keep focused on the facts at hand, and keeping the perspective of an obserer of events while keeping myself "out of the story."

Also, my accomplishments are only part of the story. I have much reason to acknowledge both the professionals and amateurs who have assisted me in many ways as I have probed deeper and deeper into the mystery of furnaces of ancient design first identified and studied by my old mentor, the late Arlington H. Mallery. This book very clearly belongs on the shelf right beside Mallery’s original Lost America and the second and expanded edition, The Rediscovery of Lost America, edited by Mallery’s literary successor, Mary Roberts Harrison. And, though Mallery had a number of short-comings as an archaeologist, no one can deny that he found a whole new kind of archaeological site in North America – the pit iron furnaces of ancient design, a design that goes back in Europe to about 500 years before the Christian Era.

I must acknowledge above all, the fine partner I had in the early years of my involvement with the pit iron furnaces, David Orr, a Ross County farmer. Orr not only contributed himself as half of the leadership for our late 20th century investigating team, but also served as the on site leader of our dig teams at the Glacial Kame and Lynn Acres excavations.

Mallery Declares Vikings Used Ohio Furnaces

Columbus Citizen, Columbus, Ohio
November 6, 1949
By Douglas Smith, Citizen Washington Bureau

“Ancient iron implements unearthed in Ross County are more than 600 years old and prove that a metal age civilization – of Scandinavian origin – existed in Ohio long before Columbus came to America, a scientist declared Saturday.” (Mallery was more properly a metallurgist and industrial engineer).

A.H. Mallery, who has made an extensive search of the stone-walled Spruce Hill “fortress” near Bourneville last year, made this announcement after finding that ancient slag from a more recent discovery in Virginia was almost identical with slag found at Spruce Hill. The Virginia material at first was thought to be fragments of an ancient meteor.

Actually this iron slag is the residue from smelted metal and is found only in the refuse piles of ancient hearth-pit furnaces, Mallery said. He found remains of these furnaces in his Ohio excavations which were almost identical with these found in all other areas settled by the Vikings.

All smelting furnaces of the American Colonial period were of another type and articles which they made have been found to be substantially different in composition from the articles he found in the Ohio and Virginia Viking excavations, Mallery said. Those found in Ohio, for example, are very different in shape from those found at Jamestown, the early Virginia settlement.

His knowledge of a metals – he is an engineer who took up archaeology as a hobby, enabled Mallery to realize the value of his significant discoveries in Ohio. When he came across the first iron shovel, it was of such a regular shape that he laid it aside, thinking it might have been left by some of the earlier researchers, diging having taken place in Ross County intermittently for decades. But upon examining it carefully, he saw it was made by a method not used in either Colonial or modern times.

Mallery sent the shovels to Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus which found they were made of low-grade iron ore by a low-temperature welding process known as “cladding.” Two sheets were laid together while hot and hammered together, leaving a space at the top for the insertion of the handle.

These Viking founders of the Ohio iron industry used “bog ore,” which still exists in various low lying areas in Ohio and elsewhere, and contains so little iron that modern-day industry considers it not worth using. But they were able to make shovels, hoes, nails, iron bars and other useful articles from it.

An even wider variety of iron articles was unearthed at the Clarksville, Va. site including tools, chisels, clinch nails, boat spikes, caulking irons, dies for nails and nail heads. The round boat rivets with washers, called “klinknagel,” are particularly significant to Mallery, because they are similar to those found in Norse ruins in Greenland, Labrador and Scandinavia and Mallery himself dug up a number of them in Newfoundland. All colonial American nails, of which thousands exist, have rectangular shanks, not round ones.

More evidence cited by Mallery that the Norsemen inhabited Ohio is his discovery of a typical Viking two-chambered grave with the traditional “runestone” marking the mound. These have been found in all the northern areas across which historians agree were settled by the Vikings.”

Mallery theorizes that the Norsemen penetrated far deeper into American than traditional history concedes to have been the case. He places there Ohio existence as about 1050 A.D. to 1400. He thinks the “Black Death,” the bubonic plague which spread all over Europe between 1350 and1400, was carried to their American settlements, and either destroyed them or so reduced them that other inhabitants were able to drive them away.

Mallery has had laboratory analysis of slag made by ten different furnaces in Ohio and Virginia, and has a number of articles besides iron fragments. He declares his findings are final proof that traditional archaeologists have been wrong in their belief that iron never was made in America before the Columbian era. They have believed that the many iron tools such as Mallery had found were made of iron deposits by meteors or brought from Europe after Columbus’ time. Chemical analysis had determined positively that this iron this iron was not of meteoric origin, he says.

Mallery is a New Yorker and an industrial and structural engineer by profession. But for many years he pursued archaeology as a hobby, and has devoted all of his time to it since being retired from the Army at the end of World War II. He was a captain in the Army engineers and was wounded in New Guinea.

(Author William Conner's note: the "runestone" mentioned in this newspaper article was actually a practical joke and the joker was Tom Porter of Chillicothe, a collecter of artifacts. The "TEP" carved on the stone were Porter's initials.)

Tool of a Prehistoric Iron Age

Found In The Woods Along Paint Creek's North Fork!

The title of this blog, "Iron Age America," is also the title of my book about what evidence indicates was a pre-Columbian and prehistoric iron age in North America in general, and Ohio in particular. The publisher is Coachwhip Books of Landisville, Pa. At this writing the book is soon to be published. As soon as it is available, news of this will be published in this blog.

The casting in the mold was the final and convincing proof to me that there certainly was a prehistoric Iron Age in North America, long before the late 1790s when American pioneers began to populate the Northwest Territory. However, even previous to this, I had found other evidence that Ohio's pit iron furnaces were prehistoric. "Iron Age America" will present this evidence which is additional proof of their prehistoric origin. The casting in its mold was found at a site now in Chillicothe park land, but was the site was part of the land of the former Garrett farm in Ross County then.

This artifact is a cast iron hand axe. Hand axes were used in prehistoric times by prehistoric people. A cast iron hand axe was certainly an improvement over stone hand axes as a heavier and harder tool.