This seems highly plausible. The Romans likely did similar things themselves, for instance burying and concealing several tons of iron nails and other goods before abandoning a fort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inchtuthil#The_Inchtuthil_hoar...

> When it was excavated in the 1950s by Richmond, a large pit was found in the summer of 1960 containing 875,400 complete iron nails (Square shaft) ranging from 50–410 mm (2–16 in) plus another 28 (round shaft nails) weighing 7 tons, together with other iron objects, including cartwheel rims weighing a combined total weight of ten tonnes (Inchtuthil Nails by “Roddy Fraser”). The pit was elaborately concealed, and the nails and ironwork were almost certainly buried by the troops to deny them to the local tribes when they dismantled the fortress before they finally left.

It's my belief, iron and ironstone being high value, they'd have taken what they could with them, the inputs. Charcoal aside, the remains otherwise are more marginal value, you can do Iron in a mud brick hearth, there wouldn't have been a lot of immovable fixed infrastructure to take really. The charcoal is a pain to make, time consuming. Maybe they burned that to avoid the romans having access, but I tend to think the Romans did this, to deny re-use when the inevitable re-occupation came. They'd have lifted what they could, and destroyed the rest.

Not an archeologist. The best way to get good input is to post bad input and wait to be corrected!

>Not an archeologist. The best way to get good input is to post bad input and wait to be corrected!

This is so true. If you ask for help, people will ignore you. But... if you post the wrong answer--people will fall over themselves to correct you. It's like a hack for human behavior.

And actively harmful in implementation. It spreads bad information, confidently posted for others to trust and duplicate.

Bad information labelled with an appropriate confidence rating can be useful as a starting point to others. ("I'm not sure but this looks sort of like a rail spike nail, maybe start there?") But labelled as good, to others that can't label it themselves, it just degrades the average value of the other information and also the confidence in it too.

HN loves this "hack" and often tells others to use it but then unironically complains about the quality of answers on Stack Overflow and the overconfidence of Dunning Kruger

Well.. no archaeologist took the bait. The scots Roman ironfoundry mystery continues

I feel like your comment only further proves the point I was making.