The Inchtuthil Nail Hoard | Hacker News Reader

The Inchtuthil Nail Hoard

scottishhistory.org

80 pointsLuc27 comments

I randomly found an anvil on sale for cheap and now our family has the blacksmithing bug. One of our favorite things to do is take a couple anvils and a small forge down to the park and let the kids smash red hot nails into "mini-swords". We have also started selling the swords on his lemonade cart, People actually buy them!

You would think this would be a dangerous activity but it turns out to be petty tame. About 1/20 kids burns a finger, and when they finish yelling they inevitably tough up and get back to work because they are having so much fun.

So anyway, scrounge up plumbing torch and some nails and let the kids make "mini-swords." You can use a sledge hammer or any big chunk of metal as your anvil.

If you want to see what the "swords" look like my kid has pictures on his site: https://lemonsword.com/

This is just too awesome for words. Those kids will come away with memories that they couldn't have made any other way.

More memories; fewer eyes

You're not wrong. Our family safety glasses compliance rate is about 50%, def something we could improve on. When supervising other people's kids I get that rate up into 90s.

I will ensure we have at least have glasses on the next time we take photos for the website lol.

This is really fantastic. But now that you've posted it, you'd better get that up to 100% or get a good lawyer. :)

I did a festivle where I set up a portable blacksmith shop, and was swarmed by kids,talking to the old time smiths, kids in shops, was the norm, given hammers as soon as they could get a good swing, it's something that never needs to be encouraged, like puppys, bicycles, and all the rest, now with video games and I got my start when I was 8....letting myself in anywhere the big doors were open. It is a known fact that making nails and small chain was a task that fell to women and children in historical times. And I must say that I am quite angry and disapointed by the archiologists who decided to send 5 tons of good ancient nails to be melted down as scrap,last paragraph in the article, as it demonstrates a very strong indication that the entire proffesion needs to be better educated and regulated.....the old times would say * " theys spoilt you, used to sucking from the front tit!"* * agricultural reference to the hiarcical order of piglets maintaining there positions when nursing over time.

That’s really sweet! What do you mean by a “small forge”? My son is interested in blacksmithing.

We just got the cheapest single burner propane forge eBay/Amazon. Working great so far. Looks like this https://www.ebay.com/itm/176573538859

Note that a forge produces big noisy flame and burns a lot of gas. If all you want to do is heat a nail a plumbing torch will suffice. But if you want to make a knife you will need some sort of forge.

Looks like an Ooni pizza oven!

Thank you!

They look great! Double-headed nails make great mini swords. I use them to show that I can make a sword in one heat. Smash it flat, file some small tapers and you're set. Plus, it fits in the hand of a lego person :P

In another era this would have been a kingly fortune. That's one risk of buried treasure: not all treasure will keep its value well. You might find a pile of gold coins, or maybe it'll be aluminum spoons (once highly valuable), cowrie shells, or iron nails.

The labor for this many nails is intense. They had to first smelt the iron, cast the pigs, "puddle" the cast iron to remove carbon and make wrought iron, hammer the wrought into rod, and THEN they could start making the nails.

800,000 nails × 3 minutes = 2.4 million minutes = 40,000 hours = 20 Years of labor

3 minutes seems like an awful long time for an experienced smith to forge a nail.

Judging from a recent thing I watched[1] ... ~1.5 mins per nail (as of the 8.5 hr + 352 nail mark), while streaming and talking.

That would bring it down to only ~7 years of labor if we call it 1 min per nail, assuming that you're already working from prepared bar stock. Still a significant expenditure of skilled labor!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jAFLG8Y1XY

A nailer in the US in the 18th century could apparently make 200 nails per hour.[1] One in the UK reported making 3,000 nails/day in the 19th century.[2] Adam Smith reported seeing boys making 2,300 nails/day.[3]

As I understand it, nail making was largely unchanged from the Roman era. One would have to adjust for work hours which differed in the past than today for those, but it like it would take someone 2 years to produce that number working modern hours, though likely less than 1 in the era they were produced.

[1] https://www.mortiseandtenonmag.com/blogs/blog/issue-15-t-o-c...

[2] https://www.bournheath-pc.gov.uk/about-bournheath/bournheath...

[3] https://www.adamsmithworks.org/documents/chapter-1-of-the-di...

Apples to oranges, but assuming the equivalent of (say) $10/hour, at 2300 nails / hr * 8 hrs, that would be $80 for 18,400 nails, or $0.004/nail.

Quick google suggests iron was 1/300 the value of silver in the Roman empire, so if we say $40/oz, that makes an oz of iron = $0.13.

a 10-penny nail is about 0.2oz, so $0.026/nail.

$0.026 + 0.004 = $0.03/nail.

If I go to home depot, 1lb / ~80 10-penny nails would cost me $9, or $0.11.

So, astoundingly, it was cheaper in the Roman empire to buy nails(??). That doesn't seem right... Modern nails are different material (galvanized / zinc coated), but still.

The gp was saying around 200 nails an hour, not 2k an hour. Your labor cost is an order of magnitude too low.

I can't find the price of nails in roman times, but 300 years ago it was around a buck a nail.

https://www.nber.org/digest/202203/tracking-price-nails-1695

That report interested me. Especially how the price has gone up in the last century. There's another study that tracks the cost of lighting over the centuries as well: https://lucept.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/william-nordha...

Sure. I guess I was pointing out in a roundabout way that one of the assumptions must be wrong. I don't think 2,300/hr feels realistic. 200 seems much more reasonable (or less). I'd be inclined to believe 1 nail per minute (sustained). If you assume $20-40/hr, now we're up $2-4/nail which seems much more reasonable.

I think you misread the original comment. It doesn't say 2,300/hr.

It says 200/hr, 3,000/day and 2,300/day.

I would not use silver to compare prices from that long ago, silver and gold were both cheaper than today.

I would use the salary for a day labor instead. Like if I spend my salary for a day on just nails, vs how many nails a smith could make for the same number of working hours.

Sure, but that means the Roman cost would be even cheaper. If silver was cheaper in Roman times, and iron was 1/300th the cost, then the Roman nail becomes even cheaper (which doesn't make sense)

I'm not sure what the hourly rate for a day laborer would be. $20/hr?

I think the real issues with this calculation are the idea someone can crank out 2,300 nails / hour. I think 1 per minute (sustained) seems much more reasonable. That makes the labor cost 40x more. And maybe it would be a semi-skilled occupation, so $20/hr or $40/hr makes more sense. So now the labor cost is 150x more.

I had the same thought, but in a different direction. They ended up just recycling most of these 800,000 nails. Seems like today this would be worth a couple million as souvenirs.

They did sell some as souvenirs for 5 shillings a piece (about 5 GBP today?) according to Wikipedia, but there's a limited quantity of people with an interest in buying ancient Roman nails at that price. They're not the most dazzling display piece.

Note also that they would have recycled most of them in the old days as well, and that's where much of the value would come from.

tl;dr The article examines some context around a 5 ton hoard of ancient roman nails discovered during 1959, at Inchtuthil (near Dunkeld in Scotland). The romans built a fort and stockpiled these nails (and other materials) at Inchtuthil. However, they needed to abandon the fort and opted to bury a cache of nails six feet below ground, rather than cart them away or leave them in place. This prevented the locals from impounding the nails and melting them into other weapons against the romans. The quantity of nails indicates the scope of materials needed to construct a fort, as well as the blacksmithing quality available at the time.

If this interests you, I recommend Bret Devereaux's five part series about medieval iron production and use, https://acoup.blog/2020/10/02/collections-iron-how-did-they-...

It came as some surprise that Inchtuthil was not a Nahuatl place name.

That did resolve my confusion, with nails not AFAIK being used by the Aztecs.

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