steel and iron weaponry of the american natives.........

[Billman]

Wood burning kilns can reach temperatures of 1300 degrees Celsius with natural draft, but require dry timber, preferably hardwood, and often several days to reach this. Wood firing can thus be used for smelting non ferrous metals, and is are hot enough for porcelain. However, to reach temperatures high enough for iron and steel wood is not sufficient, and it needs to be converted to charcoal.

Additionally most charcoal forges or furnaces require forced draft to reach temperatures hot enough to reduce iron ore (typically 1900 degrees C at the bottom, 1300 degrees C at the top), and the additional carbon that is present in charcoal to aid the reduction process.

I guess also at high altitudes there is a need for much greater volumes of air than at sea level. Iron furnaces were present in the French Alps at heights from 500 to 1000m, but the Andes have an average height of over 4000m.
Large volumes of air require some form of mecahnical blower - bellows or fan, and a power source, e.g. water wheel - so most iron and steel works were situated at the lower end of valleys with a good flow of water.

Small pot bellows, as used in the African furnaces can be used to smelt small ingots of iron, enough for one or two blades - but again the fuel is charcoal, not wood.

Iron working tends also to a result of a stable population, not a migrant community as much of North America indian populations were - they tended to pack up their tents and follow the herds of bison - so I guess this explains why it was never developed there, and the Inuit only used meteroric iron...

The stable societies of the central and south Americas, e.g. Maya amd Inca, did have metal working as demonstrated by their gold objects - but it would appear they never progressed to iron smelting. Question - did they have the knowledge of charcoal making?? This may have been a significant limiting factor......

[fearn]

According to this Study, to smelt metal on the altiplano, the Spanish had to adopt an indigenous method of channeling the wind into the furnace, since bellows didn't work. I think they did that on Sri Lanka as well? The problem is that most of the metals they were smelting were copper and silver from the mines. From what I've been able to find, bronze technology developed by around 1000 CE in the Andes. It's hard to tell how common bronze production was, but the Inkans did use iron bolts to hold some of their stones together, so it wasn't too rare.

Archeologists think the Precolumbian andean peoples used charcoal and possibly coal as fuels (link). However, the literature is annoying, because the archeologists refer to burned wood in digs as charcoal, and that makes searching for references a bit harder.

So I guess iron smelting would have been possible, but the Andean peoples never got to it. Just one of those things: prior to Columbus, there were more people living in the high Andes than there are now, so I suspect they simply had other priorities, and lots of tough rocks lying around, free for the taking, when they wanted to hit each other with something hard.

Best,

F

[Tim Simmons]

Not being qualifed this forum gives us ordinary folk a mouth piece. I do not see why small amounts of iron crossed the Bering striaghts long before Columbus and the modern historical notion of Russia. One can research cross Bering trade for other commoderties.

[fearn]

More on Andean metallurgy, not that you asked (UT-Dallas lecture link).

As for trade across the Bering Strait, I'd need to know more about what the Yakuts were using, since I'm pretty ignorant about that part of the world.

Best,

F

[Tim Simmons]

Fearn, it seems an odd cut off if these peoples did not trade across the Bering Sea. They most have encounterd iron.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chukchi_people

[Billman]

It's good to be able to hypothesise on the site.... Apparently about 60,000 tons of meteorite debris hit the earth each year.... mostly dust and rock, and over 2/3 of the earth is sea - but some will be iron or nickel iron that will fall onto the land. Heavy rocks, like the diorite hammerstones of Egypt, used to carve out the granite obelisks, are found sitting on the surface of desert regions - the lighter sands blow away, leaving the heavier rocks behind. It is thus highly probable that meteoric iron can be found in desolate spots such as the Atacama Desert of Peru, high in the Andes, or the tundra regions of the Arctic, where the hard ground prevents penetration of small meterorites. Meteoric iron was used by the ancient Egyptians, who also had the technology to smelt non ferrous metals and create alloys such as bronze, but never smelted iron.

One way of splitting hard rocks into smaller usable fragments is to heat in a fire and quench in cold water - it is not a large step to imagine ancient peoples trying to break 'rocks' of meteoric iron by this method, and failing - but in the process gaining a new material.

Once discovered any supply of such 'naturally occuring' iron would soon be exploited, and probably quickly exhausted - leaving little trace of its presence, apart from the few tools and weapons that still exist.... Equally no traces of slags from iron production would remain, so to all intent and purpose there is no evidence of iron working.. Ultimately, with no more raw materials, the knowledge and skills would disappear... c.f. Damascas steel c1700 when wootz, the source of raw material from India, dried up

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel

Natural draft furnaces can get very hot, and with the addition of a chimney the draft can be enhanced, so if they had charcoal it is possible that ancient civilisations could melt relatively pure nodules of iron. Smelting of iron ores requires higher temperatures, as the impurities raise the melting point - which is why in the manufacture of wrought iron the bloom containing the slag never reached melting point, but had to have the impurities removed by hammering...

http://www.oldeforester.com/ironintr.htm

Yes speculation, but it could explain some of the anomolies of iron or steel objects turning up where there was no evidence to support local manufacture...

[ausjulius]

Originally Posted by fearn

More on Andean metallurgy, not that you asked (UT-Dallas lecture link).

As for trade across the Bering Strait, I'd need to know more about what the Yakuts were using, since I'm pretty ignorant about that part of the world.

Best,

F

well yakuts have been using steel for a long time and had long bladed weapons swords and pole weapons , metal armor ect...

but they only came recently to such a distant area i think the 1500s, time russians were exploring through the area. a little before maybe... their homeland was further south ,,
their metal working is siberian, but siberia has a long history of metal working,, and all tribes understood it to some degree , some in an advanced level others much less. ,. although some isloated groups used till quite recent stone and bone a lot due to its abundance,, you need mines for metals for regular trade and if you dont there is free things also like stones,
is suspect the Eskimos ancestors came from Siberia with prior metal working knowledge.. as they havent been in north america longer than metal has been used by their folk on the russian side of the water.

[Tim Simmons]

Still the possibility of a certain amount of early trade is not a silly idea.

[fearn]

The best book I've found on this is Ancient People of the Arctic by Robert McGhee. The settlement of the Arctic goes back to 2500 BCE or earlier (Independence culture), and the modern Eskimo spread out of the Alaskan area around 1000 CE. The nice thing about Arctic archeology is that (until climate change does its thing) stuff rarely changes. McGhee shows pictures of artifacts, old campfire rings, and the like, that are over 1000 years old.

The Arctic has been repeopled at least three times from the west (depending on where and how you count repeopling), and there's pretty good evidence that various groups have lost technology that their Siberian ancestors had each time.

One example is the bow. The archeological record pretty strongly indicates that the bow spread out of Siberia, that the Labrador Indians picked it up from the paleo-eskimos around 2000 BCE, and that archery technology spread south and west from Labrador to the rest of the Americas. This comes from dating the switch from spear-points to arrowheads, from noting that the earliest Indian arrowheads known (in Labrador) look like poor copies of the older paleo-eskimo arrowheads to the north, and from noting that arrowheads made out of Ramah chalcedony (a distinctive Labrador stone that works really nicely) were found south to New England and west to Ontario soon thereafter.

However, the widespread Dorset culture (which was replaced by the Eskimos by around 1000 CE) lost the skills of archery that their ancestors undoubtedly had.

The problem with living in the Arctic is that population densities are low, and if a disaster hits a small band of people, it can wipe out the only people who know how to do something. In recent times, this phenomenon was documented among polar Eskimos. One band lost the ability to make bows and kayaks, when all the experts died of the flu.

Rambling story, but it illustrates why iron-working never took hold among the eskimo. There were too few, and they probably couldn't have made a forge if they'd known how (what would they use for fuel?). There may have been trade for Siberian iron tools, but there's no evidence, and the Arctic is a pretty good place to look for such evidence. Even with the groups that used meteoric iron, I haven't found a good picture of one of their blades. Apparently the archeological evidence consists of tool handles missing blades, with rust spots in the permafrost showing where the meteoric blade rusted away.

Hope this clarifies things a bit.

F