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Tin, copper and lead ores have been smelted successfully within a variety of different furnaces. Smelting sites of the Early Bronze Age have proved
difficult to find. Many of these may have been located some distance from the mines themselves, and in all probability these were simple, ephemeral structures used only once or twice and leaving little in the way of
any archaeological record. It is also possible that such furnaces operated under poorly reducing conditions and were essentially non-slagging.
Our objective was to reconstruct the simplest furnaces that would work. For this we used the bag bellows and tuyeres (ceramic pipes) that we had made,
and sometimes blowpipes and crucibles.
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