The role of ferrous metallurgy in ancient communities of the Circumpolar North is poorly understood due, in part, to the widespread assumption that iron technology was a late introduction, passively received by local populations. Analyses of two recently excavated sites in northernmost Sweden, however, show that iron technology already formed an integral part of the hunter-gatherer subsistence economy in Northern Fennoscandia during the Iron Age (c. 200–50 BC). Such developed knowledge of steel production and complex smithing techniques finds parallels in contemporaneous continental Europe and Western Eurasia. The evidence presented raises broader questions concerning the presence of intricate metallurgical processes in societies considered less complex or highly mobile.

When can we say that a Bantu smith knows the ‘meaning’ of iron smelting - only when he explicitly recognizes the underlying sexual structure of it or simply when he knows how to go on smithing? Is structuralist theory, which considers meaning as codic and diacritical, really incommensurable with a phenomenological view of meaning as something primarily experiential? In this posthumous paper, Stefan Bekaert argues that the differences between both perspectives are gradual rather than fundamental. Drawing on the sexual metaphors in Sakata iron technology, he presents a tentative scale of meaning levels: the level of typified experience, the level of pragmatic motive, the level of (meta)physical intervention, the level of experiential gestalt, the level of explicit metaphor, and the level of codic oppositions. Rejecting the ‘one-world-ism’ predominant in many social sciences, he argues that humans inhabit and draw on many worlds at once. (DVR)