Introduction

A. Hauptmann

In the cultural evolution of mankind, the production, the keeping and the controlled utilisation of fire for processing raw materials are among the most important inventions and innovations. However, and unfortunately, the processes that were used for these operations had left a rather small amount of relics especially if one considers their earliest stages.

Fire and pyrotechnology received from the archaeologists and specialists of related disciplines great interest; among them Catherine Perlés, who in 1977 published Préhistoire du Feu, a volume dedicated to this topic '. The author presented a worldwide overview of how and for which purposes fire was used by man during the Paleolithic period. Many questions, however, could only be answered by assumptions and hypotheses. Scenarios suggested that groups of hominids were hunting animals persecuted by free burning grasslands and doing so could have been in contact with fire. They began to make use of it, first by taking and keeping the fire from naturally ignited shrubs and trees. In a later stage, they learned how to make fire themselves by knocking lumps of chert or flint against one another, possibly also by using pyrite or by producing heat by drilling wood.

One of the first compilations dedicated to applied pyrotechnology was edited by T.A. Wertime and S.F. Wertime in 1981 2. These papers had been presented in a seminar held in 1979 at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. The focus of these contributions is a later and advanced stage of pyrotechnology ; all of them concern the developed transformation of materials by high temperature processes. This volume, Early Pyrotechnology - The Evolution of the First Fire- Using Industries contains articles that present data concerning the main stages of processing materials such as (lime) plaster, glass, faience, metals, and slag. When this volume was published, the authors were fully aware that it was not yet possible to present a complete handbook on early

pyrotechnology; as a consequence, their intention was to offer the state of research at that moment hoping to stimulate further activities in a field which for too long had been neglected.

Rehder's very recent volume The Mastery and Uses of Fire in Antiquity i3 brings great potentials for all archaeologists and scientists working in the field of ancient production and materials. It provides a useful and fundamental framework of the nature of heat, of the combustion of fuels used in antiquity, of the design and function of furnaces, and of the high temperature reactions. All these discussions concern ancient materials that show a limited variety i.e. pottery and figurines from clay, plaster from limestone and gypsum, metals from ores, glass from sand. The complexity of their production technologies increases exponentially from clay to lime to metals. Between the ability to fire pottery and to smelt metals there is a time span of roughly 5 000 years ; during this long time the use of fire developed through simple trials and errors. Rehder's book is an essential contribution, especially concerning the engineering part of pyrotechnology ; but these aspects cannot left aside the archaeological component.

During the last two decades, extensive interdisciplinary research, as well as the input of archaeometry allowed new achievements ; this is the reason why for this volume on early pyrotechnologies it appeared reasonable to the editor to select some contributions.

These are hardly overlapping the publications already mentioned. Basically the volume that was initiated five years ago from a conversation in Jordan, is sharing certain aspects presented in Rehder's and Wertime' s books. These volumes and Paléorient too, keep the chronological order, the purpose of the use of fire, and the sequence of materials produced. However, following the goals of Paleorient, the contributions are as much as possible limited geographically to Southwest

Paléorient, vol. 26/2. p. 5-7 <v CNRS EDITIONS 2001