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The range of the problems considered in the monograph includes both ones of purely technological nature and those related to the cultural and historical studies. The former comprise the following: reconstruction of the blacksmith technologies used when producing artefacts; identification of the raw materials used, both their character and quality; characteristic of artisan’s professional skills; revealing of technical and technological specifics of the blacksmith production in relation to the territorial and chronological classification. As for the cultural and chronological problems, we were mainly interested in the problems of continuity or discontinuity in the production traditions with regard to the consequences of the Mongol invasion, as well as in specific features of development of the blacksmith’s craft against the background of the process of formation of the centralised Russian state.

In correspondence to the raised problems this work consists of two interrelated parts. The first one is devoted to the analysis of the Russian blacksmith’s craft in the Golden Horde period. The second one deals with iron production and ironworking in the Muscovite state.

The work has been carried out by the group of metallographic investigations in the Laboratory of natural sciences, the Institute of Archaeology, Russian Academy of Sciences. It is based on the method of archaeometallography, which permits to raise and solve not only technological, but historical problems as well. When performing the metallographic analyses we applied the method of revealing technological schemes characteristic of specific modes of shaping concrete objects produced at a given archaeological site. This method was used and approved on the materials originating from the earlier periods. We use the term “technological scheme” to denote the sequence of blacksmith operations. Special attention is paid to the quality of executing separate operations, correct choice of the temperature regime, character of the raw material used, and so forth. Consequently, a technical and technological characteristic of each analysed object is obtained.

On the second stage of investigation we distributed the technological schemes by two technological groups. The basic indication for the distribution is technology used for shaping the ana-lysed artefact. Group I includes the technological schemes associated with producing objects of solid metal (iron or steel obtained in the course of various processes), and of pile-welded blanks. These technologies are related by their origin to the Early Iron Age. Group II comprises the technological schemes based on welded constructions (technological welding together of iron and steel) that widely spread in the territory of Eastern Europe only in the period of Medieval Rus’.

Having completed processing of the obtained technological data, we pass to their historical analysis as the next level of the investigation. It includes comparative analysis of interrelation between the two discussed technological groups. As a result, we present a reconstruction of production traditions developed in certain craft centres and an assessment of preservation or possible changes in the technological priorities, and discuss various factors that influenced the situation.