Experimental Silver Refining: How Does a Cupellation Furnace Work in the 16th Century?

M.-P. Guirado, F. Tereygeol and F. Peyrat are experimental archaeologists, and this peer-reviewed article in Historical Metallurgy reports their reconstruction of a sixteenth century cupellation furnace to test how it actually refined silver from lead-bearing ore. Its strength is that it is experimental archaeology in the strict sense, building and firing a working reconstruction rather than inferring the process from textual description alone, which lets the authors test claims about efficiency and process that documents alone cannot settle. Its limit is that it reconstructs one specific furnace type from one region and period, so a claim about silver refining technique in a different time or place needs a source matched to that specific context.