Iron in New Mexico

            I live in Santa Fe.  Those of you with good memories who paid attention in high school chemistry classes know that ‘Fe’ is the chemical symbol for iron (derived from the Latin word ferrum).  So, do I live in a city named for the saint of iron?  No, Santa Fé is Spanish for Holy Faith.  Or if you prefer the town’s complete name: La Villa Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asis (The Royal Town of the Holy Faith of St. Francis of Assisi.)

            But getting back to iron, it’s something we take for granted in tools and weapons.  As Pliny, the Roman author put it, “the most useful and most fatal instrument in the hand of man”.  In the southwest, iron didn’t become widespread and affordable until the coming of the railroads—with the aptly named iron horse.  The ancestral puebloans (to give the Anasazi their politically-correct name) had no metal tools, or metal weapons, and the stone age in the U.S. southwest lasted until the arrival of the Spanish, Mexicans and Americans.  The stunning complex of buildings, irrigation projects, outliers and dead-straight roads centered on Chaco Canyon was built solely with stone tools.  My hiking group likes to go down to an old mining area just south of Santa Fe in the Cerrillos Hills.  I was surprised to learn that in the 1850’s iron from here was as valuable as lead and zinc.  Wooden tools were edged with iron and when they wore out the iron was simply reused.  Early recycling!



 

Silhouette of the Cerrillos Hills about twenty miles south of Santa Fe

            Before the techniques for smelting iron from its ores were known, the only source was what fell out of the sky—literally.  Many meteorites are dominantly iron (with a few percent nickel in the alloy).  The Sumerian term for iron was “heaven metal”, while the early Egyptians called it “black copper from heaven”.  And, of course, anything appearing from the heavens was prized.

            5000 year old iron beads were discovered in a tomb at el-Gerzeh in Lower Egypt.  These had been made by rolling thin, beaten sheets of metal into tubes.  Recent analyses showed that the iron in these beads had quantities of nickel, cobalt, and phosphorous characteristic of metal from iron meteorites, and also had the unique structure expected for these meteorites.  The beads predate the knowledge of how to smelt iron ore to metal by about two thousand years.  The importance of this celestial metal to the Egyptians is clearly shown by the gold and precious stones found buried with the iron beads.

If iron contains a percent or two of carbon it is converted to steel.  This is harder and stronger than iron, but less ductile.  It has been made since at least 500 BC.

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Other people’s thoughts:

          “ . . the fundamental property of iron is rust.”      Robert Smithson.
                             and rust evokes a fear of disuse, inactivity, entropy and ruin.

This week’s trivia—staying with metal:

          Josef Visarionovich Dzhugashvili changed his name so that it meant “man of steel”, and that’s the way he ruled the Soviet Union.  We know him better as Joseph Stalin.