Neolithic and Ancient Roman Fire Methods

Description

Fomes fomentarius

http://www.selfrelianceoutfitters.com

http://astore.amazon.com/davecante-20

Dave Canterbury, David Canterbury, The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping

Video Transcription

morning folks I'm Dave Canterbury with self-reliance Outfitters in the Pathfinder school and you'll notice that this video is shot a little bit out of sequence for your benefit to give you better lighting conditions and better close-up shots on different elements of the video I promise you yesterday that I would show you a couple new things that I learned while I was in Italy at the bushcraft Italy gathering and the lead instructor and the owner of wolves or wilderness Outdoor Leadership experimental school

michael--ah poli and his wife Lavinia lorina showed me the benefits of iron pyrite iron sulphide also called fool's gold while I was in country and this was the method used by Otzi back in the Neolithic period of using a hard rock like Flint and an iron sulphide or a piece of iron pyrite to create ignition with the fungus Amadou from the horse hoof or tinder fungus which is also native to the US when I got back I started doing some further research because I'm a resource fanatic and it intrigued me to find out and I also talked to Michael to Puli some more about this during my research that there was an evolution of fire that's very interesting in Italy itself because Bootsy used this method of percussion one Rock against another to create ignition on a tinder fungus and then later on in the Roman era they discovered that you could use steel with the pyrite to remove material from the pyrite that's pyrophoric and again just like we use a fire steel today we're removing iron particles from the high carbon steel and iron is a pyrophoric which means it combust when it's exposed to air in very minut quantities at temperatures below 130 degrees and that's where that spark comes from when you strike your flint and steel together it comes from the steel in this case the spark is coming from the iron sulphide and because there's sulfur in this iron pyrite it gives you a little bit of an accelerant or extender to the spark and makes it burn a little bit longer not necessarily hotter but gives it more longevity to affect your ignition and so today what we're going to do is we're going to show the benefits of iron pyrite we're going to start a fire in the same fashion that onc started fire using the percussion method of a piece of flint and iron pyrite with the Amadou of this horse of fungus or tinder fungus horseshoe fungus it's also called and then we're going to use a steel and this steel is a steel that came from Italy and it's a paint out of rebar it's not a real high carbon steel it doesn't throw sparks anything like the steel that I have and we're going to use this with the rock to expect ignition as well and then we're going to take my fire steel and a very small piece of this same material and we're going to ignite charred material with that using the sparks from the iron sulphide but using a normal fire steel that we would use the flint and steel and by adding that small piece of material to our kit we give ourselves just a little bit more versatility because we have two different stones that we can use against the steel to affect sparks really in two different ways one from the steel one from the rock one that has a little bit more longevity but one that may throw a better shower of sparks depending on how they're used and the piece of Flint that you have so it's a very interesting concept to me and I can tell you now after this experience I will not walk out in the woods of my small fire kit in my belt pouch without at least a small piece of this iron sulphide or fool's gold in my kit now let's talk about this iron pyrite for a mentor this sulphide I'm going to get a higher null fire I'm going to get a close-up for you on this thing because this stuff is native to the US it runs in veins of quartz and it's the most common iron sulfide is pyrite so I'm going to get a close-up of this so you can see it you don't want something that's got a bunch of square iron crystals on iron pyrite crystals on it what you want is the ore that's Saran ending this course and I'm going to get a close-up for you so you can see all of that right now and then we're going to start looking at ways that we can affect mission with this memo okay so now you can see the courts there's actually a little quartz crystal right there and there's a quartz vein that runs through this a piece and there's a few square-type crystals on here but the majority of this is just more crushed material or smaller material that hasn't formed crystals yet just raw ore and you need a pretty good sized piece of this you can see this one's as big as my hand and a pretty good sized piece of Flint to make this method work very very well because you have to throw lots and lots of sparks because the sparks that you remove from this are very small so it takes a lot of them and you'll see that in the video here in just a few minutes but I wanted you to see it up close to this so you to understand what it looks like because you can get this stuff a lot of places in the US and you can find it naturally within the US as well okay so this is a large piece of iron pyrite this thing's big bigger than my fist and a large piece of the Vickey alight from Arkansas and in this case we're just going to strike the stone against the stone to get sparks so here's an iron striker that was made in Rome and that same piece in the Vic you light you can see those halfway-decent sparks I don't think rebar from any country is going to be real real high carbon steel but let me show you what it looks like when you strike this against the pyrite and this would have been the Roman method would have been using a piece of hardened steel against pyrite much more heavier sparks come from this method than from the stone Bootsie would have only had the stone on stone method while the Romans figure out through their evolution of fire that steel on the pyrite would give you a better result now I'm shooting this video a little bit out of order because I wanted you guys to be able to see some of this and lower light conditions and some of it in actually almost dark conditions so I've just got my skillet here and I'm going to take this horse up fungus which is a fungus common to the area that I was in in Italy but it's also common in the US and grows on birch trees and this is the true tinder fungus and I'm going to take my knife and get into the softer portion called the Amadou which is above the hardened portion on the bottom it sits on the tree like this this upper portion is the portion you want and you just want to scrape some of that out of there with your knife and then you want to process that down to create more surface area and I'll get it up close on this to show you what that looks like so this upper portion you can see is a different color than this portion below we can use all of this and we're just going to scrape it with the edge of our knife to expose surface area and we're going to put that material into some type of catchment device like this pan and this is what we hope to catch a spark to to create our Ember and you can see there's still plenty of that left so we can start several fires with one piece of this fungus okay that's how you take that Amadou out of that container there put it out here where I could get a little more area to work with possibly here and not be banging off of that pan so I'm just kind of spreading this out to give myself some surface area again this is where it's coming from right here and you probably see this crystal better now we get a little more light this is just a piece iron pyrite like I said it's got quartz crystals coming out of it a couple different places I'm chewing up this Arkansas navicular pretty fast this is a softer Flint I'm just throwing plenty of sparks there we go

come on come on snare here okay

yeah we got it going so I'm just gonna give this thing point err now get some tinder materials here stuff got a little damage to it but should be alright okay there's that okay so that was basically the uzi method I'll call it or the Neolithic method of striking a hard rock against the iron pyrophoric materials of the iron sulphide or the iron pyrite also known as fool's gold now you have to have three components what to make that happen you've got to have a highly combustible tinder like the Amadou of this fungus you've got to have a piece of Flint or hard very hard rock and then a piece of iron sulfide that's fairly large so that you can strike against it to get sparks and the sparks that you get from this are very very small

so again evolution of fire in Italy the Romans graduated to using steel not a hardened fire steel necessarily but just a piece of steel probably some type of what they had for tool steel which would have been wrought iron against this material to drive sparks off of which with larger Sparks and because there's sulfur in this material it acts a little bit like an accelerant it gives you a little bit of a longer burning spark and the bigger sparks that you can get the more molten material you can drive from this piece just like a fire steel today a ferrocerium rod I should say you're going to get a better result and the Romans figured out that by striking this rock against metal or steel they got a better result so that's what we're going to talk about next so what we're going to do now is we're going to take this same material and we're going to replace the rock with a steel and again this steel like I said in a segment in IR is made from rebar and I'm not sure how much carbon steel content there is in this rebar it did come from Italy so it may be a higher carbon content but striking it against this navicular like it's not really throwing a major amount of sports in fact not much more Sparks than I was getting with just a rock against this piece of raw pyrite but when you strike the steel against the pyrite the sparks become much larger and much hotter especially if you get an edge of this material like this and what the Romans figured out was that they didn't have to have this Amadou they could use just charred material but we can also use this Amadou and achieve the same result

the problem is directing the sparks into the Amadou just like you have when you're using the rock so what we're going to do is we're going to try and dig out some more this Amadou and process it here on the table again and again I'm just scraping this out with the edge of my knife and then processing it down after the fact to create more surface area just like we do when we use any other method of ignition surface area is always the key to good ignition get this piece off of this hard edge don't want that and then we'll spread this out a little bit and process it down just a little bit finer and there's no doubt that this fungus grows on birch trees in Michigan I've looked at the u.s. Forest Service's website and their PDF on these type funguses and they show it as growing on the paper birch which there are lots and lots of in Michigan so I got a buddy of mine keeping an eye out for this fungus for me again I brought this piece back from the bushcraft Italy gathering but it's exactly the same species that we have in the States so now let's take this and do the experiment do an experiment I should say I'm already I'm still speaking broken English from we do an experiment to try and drive sparks from this on to our ommited I almost had done catch pretty directly off the bat there almost this is not something I've done 100 times so there we go

you'll know when it catches you'll see it immediately fire up I'm going to bring the camera over here try fan that for a minute so you can see it try not to turn the camera on and off too much so you know there's no monkey business going on here okay so here is the same tinder material with the pyrite and the steel okay so in this case we've used a piece of steel and the Flint excuse me a piece of steel in the pyrite to create our coal

so this is a very very good material and we'll give you results from different methods of striking the stone or the mineral and I think that makes it a very important resource because it is available throughout the US okay so the next thing I want to talk about I'm going to put this bigger stuff away in this more primitive Neolithic style and Roman style kit here and we're going to look at a regular fire steel like a flint and steel set and the advantages of carrying something like a piece of iron pyrite you can see that embers still sitting there burning as I'm doing this so I've got a small piece of pie right here and my regular steel and a piece of Flint except this time what we're going to do is we're going to use char cloth that I've got here we're going to take a piece of this char cloth off and we're going to attempt ignition of this char cloth with the iron sulfide or the pyrite and I think what you're going to find is that it gives you a more reliable or quicker ignition or definitely as fast but because you don't have any sulfur coming off of here you don't have the longevity of spark that you have with the fool's gold or the iron pyrite and remember that you're doing things in kind of opposite direction here because when you remove material from a fire steel to make a flint and steel fire you're actually removing iron particles from the steel itself that's powerful to create those sparks in this case we're banking on this steel being high than the material or the mineral so that we can remove sparks from this material instead

okay folks I'm Dave Canterbury with self-reliance out there in the Pathfinder school and I appreciate you joining me today for this video on the benefits and uses of iron pyrite for ignition I thank you for your views and your support I thank you for everything you do for our school for family and for business on our sponsors instructors affiliates and Friends and I'll be back with another video as soon as I can thanks guys