So, how did the acquisition of metal work in medieval times?

[adwyn]

Also remember that with the exception of gold nuggets and precious gems, ores will require smelting to remove the impurities. This takes an enormous amount of energy, traditionally from burning wood or peat. Several mining regions in Africa during the middle ages quickly stripped the nearby enviroment of the wood necessary to run even pre industrial smelting. Thus low grade ores had to be haulled a considerable distance or wood brought to the site. Either way the effort to result ratio meant that many mines played out while they were still rich because the final product was too hard to get.

 

[mythusmage]

Okay, now you've got your ore. Now you need to get the metal out of the ore. Sometimes refining is a simple matter of heating the ore. Other times you need to use chemicals. Often those chemicals are dangerous. Very often you'll need to crush and grind the ore, and that involves dangerous equipment.

Then you need to put your output into a form that can be easily transported. Bars and ingots and things like that there. Which leads to...

Getting the metal to where it's going to be turned into something useful. Which is a whole 'nother topic.

BTW, coke (the fuel, not the drink) is made from coal, using the same technique used to turn wood into charcoal. It produces a very hot fire, and with a sustained draft (as in a blast furnace) the flame can get hot enough to melt iron.

It's been awhile since I read up on the whole thing. I recommend a visit to a good library for details.

 

[Vaxalon]

Processing ore was often simply a matter of heating it up in a kiln. This works for copper, gold, silver, iron, tin, lead... any metal that doesn't have "-ium" in the name of the element is old enough that simple methods sufficed.

Chemical processing of ores is a much more modern invention.

My google-fu is strong:
http://www.getmedievalonline.com/armory.html

The word you want to look up for ore processing is "smelting."

 

[tarchon]

Metallic gold (almost always), copper, iron (fairly common), silver (rare), tin, lead, and zinc (very rare) are all found in natural metal deposits, which require very minimal processing. For gold, copper, and iron, native metal deposits are known to have been economically important.
The smelting process is pretty similar for most of their ores - heat it with some organic reducing agent like charcoal - so you can imagine ancient metallurgists probably looked for new ores by taking dense, odd looking rocks and trying to smelt them to see what they'd get.

 

[Jonny Nexus]

Have you read "Oryx and Crake?"

No. Is that based on this idea/issue?

 

[Aaron2]

This takes an enormous amount of energy, traditionally from burning wood or peat.

You need to burn an entire mature oak tree for every 50 lb. of iron.

Aaron

 

[Jesus_marley]

If that is true, then it does lead on to one interesting story possibility, which is that if our civilisation fell (say nuclear war or asteroid strike) then it would be very hard for a new industrial civilisation to rise up (a thousand years later say) because there would be no metal available. (i.e. the only metals left would be very deep underground and would require advanced tools to get at them - and you can't go from the stone age to deep level mining techniques in one jump).

Aren't you forgetting about the sheer abundance of already smelted metals simply lying around? I would think that a post disaster civilisation would at least in the short term be able to completely forgo any and all mining in favour of scavenging. Of course, in the long term this could prove problematic in that eventually, when the need for mining again arises, the necessary knowledge to do so would be lost. But that would be far far into the future for the post disaster civilisation anyway since the amount of available metals would far exceed the available need based on curent and post disaster population levels.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

Metallic gold (almost always), copper, iron (fairly common), silver (rare), tin, lead, and zinc (very rare) are all found in natural metal deposits, which require very minimal processing. For gold, copper, and iron, native metal deposits are known to have been economically important.
The smelting process is pretty similar for most of their ores - heat it with some organic reducing agent like charcoal - so you can imagine ancient metallurgists probably looked for new ores by taking dense, odd looking rocks and trying to smelt them to see what they'd get.

Before around 1400, there were only seven known metals, all of which had been known of since ancient times (Gold, Copper, Silver, Lead, Tin, Iron, and Mercury). Platinum was unknown, but that's most likely due to the only deposits being in the New World. So you typical D&D world will only have eight metals in common use. Arsenic, Zinc, Bizmuth, and Antimony were all known (to one degree or another) by the end of the 16th century. So people wouldn't be likely to putter around trying to discover new metals.

 

[PaulKemp]

No. Is that based on this idea/issue?

No, but it is an observation made by one of the protagonists in the novel. It stayed with me because I, like you, thought it an idea with lots of story potential.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

It's a little known fact that the presence of Balrogs in the mines kept medieval societies from mining mithril. I read about it in a book by a guy named Tolkien.