question: In today’s high tech world, how come we are not able to reproduce ancient crafting methods like Roman Concrete, Damascus Steel, or Greek Fire?
comment: It's not that we can't reproduce them technologically, it's that the exact method or recipe was lost to history, so we can't make the exact same thing. & #x200B; Take the roman concrete. If you look at a map of Volcanoes in Europe you will see that there is barely any. There is some on Greek Island, but the only concentrations on mainland are in Italy or in Turkey. That's the key to the Roman concrete, because it's a natural concrete using volcanic ash. Something that you can't really do in most of the rest of the world, because of the lack of volcanoes. Concrete today is artificial, meaning we use rocks and minerals that we find pretty much everywhere and use an process of heating to transform it into Portland concrete. It's not as good as Roman concrete, but you can do it anywhere in any quantity, while roman concrete can only be made from Volcanic Ash that is limited geographically and in quantity. The exact recipe of the Roman concrete isn't known, but we figure out the Ash thing and today we use those and other additive that we discovered since then to make really good concrete. Today we can make better concrete than the Roman, but we can also make lesser concrete that is cheaper and allow you to make more building. We make the concrete we need, while Roman only had the choice of volcanic ash concrete. & #x200B; For Greek fire, we have only some description of it, but we don't know what it was exactly. There is some theories about what was the composition, but what is for sure, our current Napalm is way more effective than Greek Fire was. We also most like know how to make Greek Fire, we simply don't know if it is Greek fire or not. For example, some think that Greek Fire was saltpetre, which would make Greet Fire some early gunpowder weapon. We know how to make that and we make it better, but we don't know if Greek Fire really was saltpetre or something else. & #x200B; We have a similar situation for Damascus Steel. We can do better steel today, but Damascus Steel was some damn good steel for their time. It took centuries until modern metallurgy was able to create steel as good and eventually better. The exact method is lost to history, but several reverse engineering were done over the year and those gave pretty good damn steel too. We just don't know if any of them are really the same as the one use for Damascus Steel. In addition, most our steel today is for construction and so we make the cheapest steel possible for what we need, so yes Damascus steel is stronger than our average construction steel today, but that's not the only type of steel we can make. & #x200B; There is a lot of romanticisation of those old material from the past. Truth is most of their fame come from the fact that we lost their method to history and if we really know what the recipe was, we barely would use it outside of some novelty items and certainly not on a large scale.
passages: Wood, bone, stone, and earth are some of the materials which formed the structures of the Roman Empire. Certain structures were made possible by the character of the land upon which these structures are built; a volcanic peninsula with stone aggregates and conglomerates containing crystalline material will produce material which weathers differently from soft, sedimentary rock and silt. That is one of the reasons that the concrete Pantheon of Rome could last for 1850 years, and why the thatched farmhouses of Holland sketched by Rembrandt have long since decayed.
   The advancements in nanotechnology and computing necessary for claytronics to become a reality are feasible, but the challenges to overcome are daunting and will require great innovation. In a December 2008 interview, Jason Campbell, a lead researcher from Intel Labs Pittsburgh, said, "my estimates of how long it is going to take have gone from 50 years down to just a couple more years. That has changed over the four years I’ve been working on the project".
  
  Section::::See also.
  
  BULLET::::- Ensemble axiom
  
  BULLET::::- Nanotechnology
  
  BULLET::::- Smartdust
   The Iron Age is a cultural period from roughly 1200 BC to 50 BC with the widespread use of iron for tools and weapons. Iron is not much harder than bronze but by adding carbon iron becomes steel which was being produced after about 300 BC. Steel can be hardened and tempered producing a sharp, durable cutting edge. A new woodworking tool allowed by the use of steel is the hand-plane.
  
  Section::::Iron Age construction.:Ancient Mesopotamia.
   The experimental archaeometallurgy of iron is more recent then that of copper in that for the most part was not widely studied until the mid-20th century. This can be attributed to the modern smelting of wrought iron still being produced as an industry up until 1900, when the last of the large-scale production shut down, along with the belief among researchers that many of the same techniques had been passed down since the inception of bloomery iron. A static technique simply was not the case as the technology used to make Roman Era iron showed the use of a technology that had long since disappeared. That being said research in iron has progressed beyond that of copper due to the greater amount of historic text and surviving remains of iron production.
   Lost inventions
  
  This is a list of lost inventions:
  
  BULLET::::- Greek fire
  
  BULLET::::- Damascus steel
  
  BULLET::::- Flexible glass
  
  BULLET::::- Starlite
  
  BULLET::::- Sloot Digital Coding System
  
  BULLET::::- Iron pillar of Delhi, notable for the rust-resistant composition of the metals used in its construction.
  
  BULLET::::- Artificial petrifaction of human cadavers invented by Girolamo Segato
  
  BULLET::::- Construction technique involved at Saksaywaman where blocks were put into place by carving them precisely. The method used to match precisely the shape of a stone with the adjacent stones is unknown
  
  BULLET::::- The high-precision small holes in the blocks of stones at Pumapunku
  
  Section::::See also.
   A mold for casting an oxhide ingot was discovered in the LBA north palace at Ras Ibn Hani in Syria. It is made of fine-grained "ramleh", a "shelly" limestone. Archaeologists found burnt copper droplets around the mold. In spite of the questionable durability of limestone, Paul Craddock et al. concluded that limestone can be used for casting “large simple shapes” such as oxhide ingots. Evolution of carbon dioxide from the limestone would damage the metal surface that touched the mold. Thus, metal objects requiring surface detail could not be produced successfully.
   But have you ever asked yourselves sufficiently how much the erection of every ideal on earth has cost? How much reality has had to be misunderstood and slandered, how many lies have had to be sanctified, how many consciences disturbed, how much "God" sacrificed every time? If a temple is to be erected a temple must be destroyed: that is the law – let anyone who can show me a case in which it is not fulfilled! – Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Genealogy of Morality"
   Although the three-dimensional structure and internal environment of the pores can be in theory controlled through proper selection of nodes and organic linking groups, the direct synthesis of such materials with the desired functionalities can be difficult due to the high sensitivity of MOF systems. Thermal and chemical sensitivity, as well as high reactivity of reaction materials, can make forming desired products challenging to achieve. The exchange of guest molecules and counter-ions and the removal of solvents allow for some additional functionality but are still limited to the integral parts of the framework. The post-synthetic exchange of organic linkers and metal ions is an expanding area of the field and opens up possibilities for more complex structures, increased functionality, and greater system control.
   "There is no reason why its recent inferiority in mechanical construction, whether military or civilian, should continue indefinitely. Even a slight accession of material power would make the further control of Islam by an alien culture difficult. A little more and there will cease that which our time has taken for granted, the physical domination of Islam by the disintegrated Christendom we know."
   However, during this period a vast and highly important technological innovation happened using the cementation process, the production of crucible steel. Steel production using iron and carbon works similarly to brass, with the iron metal being mixed with carbon to produce steel. The first examples of cementation steel is wootz steel from India (Craddock 1995: p276), where the crucibles were filled with the good quality low-carbon wrought iron and carbon in the form of organics such as leaves, wood etc. However, no charcoal was used within the crucible. These early crucibles would only produce a small amount of steel as they would have to be broken once the process has finished.
   Iron smelting—the extraction of usable metal from oxidized iron ores—is more difficult than tin and copper smelting. While these metals and their alloys can be cold-worked or melted in relatively simple furnaces (such as the kilns used for pottery) and cast into molds, smelted iron requires hot-working and can be melted only in specially designed furnaces. Iron is a common impurity in copper ores and iron ore was sometimes used as a flux, thus it is not surprising that humans mastered the technology of smelted iron only after several millennia of bronze metallurgy.
   The earliest cast iron artifacts, dating to 5th century BC, were discovered by archaeologists in what is now modern Luhe County, Jiangsu in China. Cast iron was used in ancient China for warfare, agriculture and architecture. Around 500 BC, metalworkers in the southern state of Wu achieved a temperature of 1130 °C. At this temperature, iron combines with 4.3% carbon and melts. The liquid iron can be cast into molds, a method far less laborious than individually forging each piece of iron from a bloom.
   Only with the capability of the production of carbon steel does ferrous metallurgy result in tools or weapons that are equal or superior to bronze. To this day bronze and brass have not been replaced in many applications, with the spread of steel being based as much on economics as on metallurgical advancements. A range of techniques have been used to produce steel from smelted iron, including techniques such as case-hardening and forge welding that were used to make cutting edges stronger.
   Whereas in former times the kings my forefathers had created bronze statues imitating real-life forms to put on display inside their temples, but in their method of work they had exhausted all the craftsmen, for lack of skill and failure to understand the principles they needed so much oil, wax and tallow for the work that they caused a shortage in their own countries—I, Sennacherib, leader of all princes, knowledgeable in all kinds of work, took much advice and deep thought over doing that work. Great pillars of bronze, colossal striding lions, such as no previous king had ever constructed before me, with the technical skill that Ninushki brought to perfection in me, and at the prompting of my intelligence and the desire of my heart I invented a technique for bronze and made it skillfully. I created clay moulds as if by divine intelligence...twelve fierce lion-colossi together with twelve mighty bull-colossi which were perfect castings... I poured copper into them over and over again; I made the castings as skillfully as if they had only weighed half a shekel each
   In developing countries, a number of factors need to be considered in addition to the points above. Scholar Waldman-Brown names the following: lack of manufacturing expertise and informality of current SMMs in emerging markets as an obstacle to quality control for final products and raw material as well as universities and vocational training programs not apt to react rapidly enough to provide the necessary knowledge and qualifications.
  
  Section::::Examples.
  
  BULLET::::- Open Source Ecology, a project for designing and building open source industrial machines, fabricated by eXtreme Manufacturing
  
  BULLET::::- Examples of open source 3D-Printable Products for Self-Directed Sustainable Development at http://www.appropedia.org/Category:OSAT_3D-Printable_Designs
   The Villa Roccia 2009-2010 took this pioneering work a step further with the a design for a Villa at Porto Rotondo, Sardinia, Italy in collaboration with D-Shape. The design for the Villa focused on the development of a site specific architectural language influenced by the rock formations on the site and along the coast of Sardinia, while also taking into account the use of a panellised prefabricated 3D printing process. The project went through prototyping and didn't proceed to full construction. 
   The cementation process, which was lost from the end of the Roman to the early Medieval period, continued in the same way with brass. Brass production increased during the medieval period due to a better understanding of the technology behind it. Furthermore, the process for carrying out cementation for brass did not change greatly until the 19th century. 
   It was not possible to mass manufacture steel or pure iron because of the high temperatures required. Furnaces could reach melting temperature but the crucibles and molds needed for melting and casting had not been developed. Steel could be produced by forging bloomery iron to reduce the carbon content in a somewhat controllable way, but steel produced by this method was not homogeneous.
  
  In many Eurasian cultures, the Iron Age was the last major step before the development of written language, though again this was not universally the case.
   All these discrepancies among scholars are largely related to the chronological problem.
  
  Section::::Possible manufacturing techniques.
  
  According to art historian Peter Rockwell, several metal tools have been used, probably made of bronze. In particular these tools can be noted:
  
  BULLET::::- a stone-cutter's chisel, that is a chisel with blades of diverse sizes;
  
  BULLET::::- an implement similar to a hand scraper, employed like or together with abrasives;
  
  BULLET::::- a dry-point to carve sharp lines in detail;
  
  BULLET::::- an instrument to produce holes, similar to a drill, whose usage by Nuragic people has been proven by archaeological finds;
   Silver, copper, tin and meteoric iron can also be found native, allowing a limited amount of metalworking in ancient cultures. Egyptian weapons made from meteoric iron in about 3000 BC were highly prized as "daggers from Heaven".
   The earliest building materials used by ancient peoples, such as wood and mud, were organic. Organic materials were used because they were plentiful and renewable. Unfortunately, the organic materials used were also very susceptible to the two most significant impediments to preservation and conservation: the elements and life (both human and animal). Over time inorganic materials like brick, stone, metal, concrete, and terra cotta began to be used by ancient people instead of organic ones, due to their durability. In fact, we know that these materials are durable because many ancient structures that are composed of them, even some built as far back as the Bronze Age, like Egypt's Great Pyramids, still stand today.
   For several millennia before the onset of industrialisation, design, technical expertise, and manufacturing were often done by individuals craftsmen, who determined the form of a product at the point of its creation, according to their own manual skill, the requirements of their clients, experience accumulated through their own experimentation, and knowledge passed on to them through training or apprenticeship.
   BULLET::::- 1st millennium BC – Pewter beginning to be used in China and Egypt
  
  BULLET::::- 1000 BC – The Phoenicians introduce dyes made from the purple murex.
  
  BULLET::::- 3rd century BC – Wootz steel, the first crucible steel, is invented in ancient India
  
  BULLET::::- 50s BC – Glassblowing techniques flourish in Phoenicia
  
  BULLET::::- 20s BC – Roman architect Vitruvius describes low-water-content method for mixing concrete
  
  Section::::1st millennium.
  
  BULLET::::- 3rd century – Cast iron widely used in Han Dynasty China
  
  BULLET::::- 300 – Greek alchemist Zomius, summarizing the work of Egyptian alchemists, describes arsenic and lead acetate
   Concrete is a fluid that offers the opportunity to economically create structures of almost any geometry - concrete can be poured into a mould of almost any shape. This fluidity is seldom used, with concrete instead being poured into rigid moulds to create high material use structures with large carbon footprints. The ubiquitous use of orthogonal moulds as concrete formwork has resulted in a well-established vocabulary of prismatic forms for concrete structures, yet such rigid formwork systems must resist considerable pressures and consume significant amounts of material. Moreover, the resulting member requires more material and has a greater self-weight than one cast with a variable cross section.
   Section::::History.:Iron Age.
  
  The use of crucibles in the Iron Age remains very similar to that of the Bronze Age with copper and tin smelting being used to produce bronze. The Iron Age crucible designs remain the same as the Bronze Age.
  
presuppositions: In today’s high tech world, we are not able to reproduce ancient crafting methods like Roman Concrete, Damascus Steel, or Greek Fire. We should be able to reproduce ancient crafting methods with modern technology.
corrections: We can technologically reproduce ancient crafting methods like Roman Concrete, Damascus Steel, or Greek Fire; however not in exactly the same way, as the original recipes have been lost to history. Even with modern technology, exact methods or recipes are lost to history.
raw_presuppositions: In today’s high tech world, we are not able to reproduce ancient crafting methods like Roman Concrete, Damascus Steel, or Greek Fire. We should be able to reproduce ancient crafting methods with modern technology.
raw_corrections: We can technologically reproduce ancient crafting methods like Roman Concrete, Damascus Steel, or Greek Fire; however not in exactly the same way, as the original recipes have been lost to history. Even with modern technology, exact methods or recipes are lost to history.