This is a cool thread...(somehow in spite of it being pinned it's the first i see it...
...)
Lots of valuable info...albeit any organisation is lacking,so would be very difficult to reference any of materials here,alas...
Divorced from my forge i'm desperately seeking solace in axe theory...(never a particularly satisfying deal,but marginally better than nuffink
...)
And have come across the following research in archaeology of axes,and decided to deposit it here,for s**s&giggles...
Here's the paper itself,and lower down i'll talk briefly about what it is and whence et c.It's reasonably fresh,as these things go,early 2000-teens it seems.
https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/klassifikatsiya-srednevekovyh-toporov-permskogo-preduralya/viewer
This paper is about an archaeological inquiry into axes made and used by Mari people(a rather disappointing overview:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mari_people).
They are a Finno-Ugric group of folks that (probably)originated in Western Siberia,but at some point early in first millenium A.D. have crossed the Ural mountain range over to the European side of it(poor suckers...ended up square in Mordor..)...Afterwards,they seemed to've spread further North and Northeast,becoming ass'd tribes along the Northern coast of Mordor and Westward,such as Karelia and Finland(also a smaller group seemed to have headed to Hungary).
There they settled,and live there to this day;they Did try to get rid of "russians"(for lack of better term;as in whatever ruffianly tribes were filed under that ambiguous adjective during those centuries),but alas unsuccessfully,their three known major attempts failed(one by a Very narrow margin).
What's germane here,however,is that they have brought with them(from Siberia or wheresover) sufficient ad skills.Enough to make iron via reduction process,as well as to know the ABC's of Iron-Carbon reaction,an ability to produce either and most probably the HT of carbon steel as well.
All of those skills allowed them to make axes of many shapes and sizes,some startlingly "modern"-looking(the correction must be made for the incurable Half-Assness of USSR/RF science...some artefacts could be from elsewhere...Anywhere...(and it's not the fault of scientists themselves for the most part but the Mordor-state running the biz).
An interesting rabbit-trail may be that the so-called "ost-vikings",those that went North and East and then South overland to Caspian and Black seas have done this by taking the very rivers that were inhabited then by assorted Mari tribes.
So if there was an exchange of ideas on tool-making between those folks and what may've been the result is still a very much open question.
In any case,check out those neat axes...Both slit&drifted and welded composites are represented,many eye shapes,lugs,et c.,et c...
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