The scarcity of records and artifacts, and the rapidity of the switch from Bronze Age to Iron Age, is a reason to use evidence of bronze smithing to infer about the early development of blacksmithing.

And this was a company where I built parabolas, I took metal shop, and I remember walking into metal shop building parabolas and Stirling engines.

As this source of this iron is extremely rare and fortuitous, little development of smithing skills peculiar to iron can be assumed to have occurred.

What information exists indicates that all of the basic operations of blacksmithing were in use as soon as the Iron Age reached a particular locality.

And before that, I was a silversmith, and before that, I was I was out of the house at about 15 and a half, and I never wound up going into college.