Good points Fearn. I think the idea of oxygenating a fire is not hard to grasp even if an area is not known for ceramic production. One just has to think of the low fired ceramic wares from Africa, often fired on an open fire or smouldering dung fire. Yet we see African smelting of iron from a hole in the ground, the fire oxygenated from simple bag bellows. I would imagine simple smelting sites like these would present problems for archaeologists to differentiate from domestic hreaths? The picture is from "Kwakiul Art, Audrey Hawthorn, University of Washington Press. Perhaps inspired by European design or not? but I cannot believe that people who make such splendid articulated masks would have problems arriving at a form of bellows.
|