The relics were unearthed at a highway construction site in Yaojiawan in Qiantang village of Xishui county, in central China's Hubei Province.

The soil layer with numerous red pottery pieces ranges between 150 and 250 centimeters in thickness, containing debris such as molds, red soil furnace walls, cinders, burnt chars and various forms of casting tools, according to Wu Xiaosong, curator of the Huanggang Municipal Museum in the province's Huanggang city on Tuesday.

Experts with the prestigious Beijing University of Science and Technology and the Chinese University of Science and Technology said after repeated studies that the molds were used in making iron appliances like kettles for daily use, though it has been generally acknowledged that iron was first widely used in making farming instruments and weaponry, Wu Xiaosong noted.

Experts are exploring residential and burial sites around the iron casting workshops, in a hope of further revealing ancient iron casting process and crafts.

Iron smelting and casting technologies were of great significance to production processes at ancient times. Ruins of mines have been found in Hubei Province and its adjacent Hunan province.

The discovery of the foundry, the first of its kind along the Yangtze River, disclosed where the plentiful ore resources in the area finally went and the iron products might have been shipped through the Yangtze to other parts of China, said Li Taoyuan, a noted researcher with the Hubei Provincial Archeology Institute.

Ancient iron products are rarely found in archeological field work, since iron could be recast or destroyed by rust, Wu Xiaosong said.

Meanwhile, archeologists have excavated a wealth of iron casting relics along the Yellow River in northern China, but this is the first one spotted along the Yangtze River.

(Xinhua News Agency May 27, 2003)