Tag: sand

Tudor Period Mining and Metal Smelting

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During the Tudor period, lead was utilized to build roofs and windows because it was easily mailable and resistive to corrosion. Farmers would mine for lead during the summer months when their crops did not need tending to in order to generate additional income. Mining during the summer months could earn an extra £5.00 which equates to £25,000 as of 2012 when accounting for inflation. Entire families often worked within the mines because 50 barrels worth of ore and soil would be extracted per day to meet the quota of what was required to be profitable. Smelting involved the use of white coal which is effectively dried wood from a kiln and was always setup upon windy hilltops or mountains because the wind would cause the fire blaze with more intensity therefore reaching higher overall temperatures. The best wood to make white coal is oak. Kilns must be airtight, so gaps were filled with clay. Knowing a kiln to be airtight was easily verifiable by searching for smoke as if smoke only came out of only the front entrance, the kiln was considered airtight. Ore was smashed into small pieces to help it smelt more rapidly which yielded approximately an 80% return upon investment. Metals were then refined using a secondary kiln, and smelted to remove any ash or impurities. The first burn removes ore from the rock, and the second burn removes impurities with the main impurity being sulphur. Molds were constructed using sand and wood to create divots which allowed the ore to be molded into blocks much the same as a modern day bar of gold. The sand gives the mold an indentation which archeologists use to identify Medieval bars of smelted ore

Timbuktu, Mali and its Cultural and Commercial Traditions

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Timbuktu, Mali is located at the precise point where the Niger River flows northward into the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, which is an incredibly difficult place to reach and is why it is often used in the English language as a representative of a far away place. In Timbuktu, men keep their faces veiled while in the presence of women at all times, not even lowering their veils to eat, instead taking in food from underneath the veil. Women predominantly make familial decisions and hold the position of power within society. Timbuktu is made up of various ethnic tribes including the Kel Tamasheq, Songaï (pronounced “sore-eye”) (sometimes spelled as “Songhai”) and Arabs primarily. Timbuktu was founded by the Tuareg people however their numbers are vastly outweighed by the 3 main tribes of Timbuktu during the modern era. Despite once being a trading hub of both of salt and gold, Timbuktu now primarily trades in salt as the price of gold has made gold inaccessible for the average inhabitant. Timbuktu is slowly being buried in the sands of the Sahara Desert as these sands blow in and slowly but surely bury Timbuktu’s structures a little bit at a time. Fortunately, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization has been helping to preserve the city of Timbuktu and its buildings from the elements of sand, wind, and rain which have eroded its structures made from natural materials, mainly adobe and mud brick

The First Mass Produced Items of the Ancient World

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The first mass produced pieces of artwork were the ancient Egyptians shabtis which were essentially miniature mummies that the ancient Egyptians believed had magical powers and were therefore buried with the dead. Shabtis were comprised of Egyptian faience which is a type of glass ceramic material made from sand. Egyptian faience is referred to as such in order to distinguish it from faience, which is a tin glazed pottery associated with Faenza, Italy. The idea of Egyptian faience was to replicate semiprecious stones like turquoise lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, which at the time was more expensive than gold. The recipe for Egyptian faience is 90% crushed silica, crushed fine natron salt to act as a flux, crushed limestone, and then the coloring with blue being the most popular, a color achieved through the use of pure copper oxide. Water was introduced to turn this composition from a granular mix into a dough like substance. Natron salt which is a type of baking soda, is the key ingredient to this recipe as it rises to the surface when baked and lowers the overall temperature at which sand melts and becomes glass. The statues are left to stand for 24 or more hours as this helps the salt grow on the surface through a chemical reaction process as oxygen within the ambient environment mixes with the ingredients inside the Egyptian faience

The Connection Between Parrot Fish and Sand

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On some beach islands in the Maldives, as much as 70% of all sand comes from the excrement of parrot fish. Parrot fish primarily consume coral which is composed of calcium carbonate and causes their excrement to become white sand. A single parrot fish can eat enough coral to expel 1 tonne of sand within a single year

Cement vs Concrete

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Cement and concrete are not the same thing although they are commonly incorrectly used interchangeably. Cement is an ingredient of concrete which is a very fine powder made from limestone, sand, clay, iron ore, water, and stone. Proportions of these ingredients are crushed and heated in a kiln to form what is referred to as “clinker”. The clinker is crushed again with gypsum and a number of other ingredients, and the result is a fine powder which is then referred to as “cement”. Aggregates in concrete such as sand and stone, coarse and fine, are for volume only and are not active ingredients in the hydration process