section_path: History/Ancient
section_name: Ancient
paragraph_text: Ancient
  
  Steel was known in antiquity and was produced in bloomeries and crucibles.
  
  The earliest known production of steel is seen in pieces of ironware excavated from an archaeological site in Anatolia (Kaman-Kalehöyük) which are nearly 4,000 years old, dating from 1800 BC.
  
  Wootz steel was developed in Southern India and Sri Lanka in the 1st millennium BCE. Metal production sites in Sri Lanka employed wind furnaces driven by the monsoon winds, capable of producing high-carbon steel. Large-scale wootz steel production in India using crucibles occurred by the sixth century BC, the pioneering precursor to modern steel production and metallurgy.
  
  High-carbon steel was produced in Britain at Broxmouth Hillfort from 490–375 BC, and ultrahigh-carbon steel was produced in the Netherlands from the 2nd-4th centuries AD. The Roman author Horace identifies steel weapons such as the falcata in the Iberian Peninsula, while Noric steel was used by the Roman military.
  
  The Chinese of the Warring States period (403 – 221 BC) had quench-hardened steel, while Chinese of the Han dynasty (202 BC — AD 220) created steel by melting together wrought iron with cast iron, thus producing a carbon-intermediate steel by the 1st century AD.
  
  There is evidence that carbon steel was made in Western Tanzania by the ancestors of the Haya people as early as 2,000 years ago by a complex process of "pre-heating" allowing temperatures inside a furnace to reach 1300 to 1400 °C.