Angkor-Era Iron-Smelting Furnace Unearthed in Cambodia

(Mitch Hendrickson)

 Angkor-Era Iron-Smelting Furnace Unearthed in Cambodia

 | 7 February 2017

PREAH VIHEAR PROVINCE, CAMBODIA—An international team of scientists has discovered an Angkor-era iron smelter, according to a report in Cambodia Daily. Mitch Hendrickson of the University of Illinois at Chicago said that the team uncovered some collapsed sidewalls and the base of a nearly 1,000-year-old furnace, which was set at an angle so that liquefied iron ore could flow out of it. “The way that we think they built them is that they constructed the furnaces out of clay: They smelt the iron and then, to extract the bloom, they had to break down the walls,” Hendrickson explained. Traces of at least six such furnaces have been found at the site, but Hendrickson and archaeologist Phon Kaseka of the Royal Academy of Cambodia expect that the site was used to produce iron for a long period of time, and probably holds the remains of many such small furnaces, which measured only about three feet by six feet. Iron was used to make weapons, tools, and reinforcement bars for Angkor’s many stone temples. For more, go to “Angkor Urban Sprawl.”