Doubt on the Old Copper timeline

March 19, 2021 11:52 AM

Ancient Native Americans were among the world’s first coppersmiths. The dates show that early Native Americans were among the first people in the world to mine metal and fashion it into tools. They also suggest a regional climate shift might help explain why, after thousands of years, the pioneering metallurgists abruptly stopped making most copper tools and largely returned to stone and bone implements.
posted by Alex404 (16 comments total)

But why did the ancient copper experiment abruptly end? Bebber’s work replicating Old Copper–style arrowheads, knives, and awls suggests they weren’t necessarily superior to the alternatives, especially after factoring in the time and effort required to produce metal implements. In controlled laboratory tests, such as shooting arrows into clay blocks that simulate meat, she found that stone and bone implements were mostly just as effective as copper. That might be because Great Lakes copper is unusually pure, which makes it soft, unlike harder natural copper alloys found elsewhere in the world, she says. Only copper awls proved superior to bone hole punchers.

(And as the article goes on to note, copper awls continued to be used after other copper tools were not.)

Tin, which is alloyed with copper to make bronze, is rare in North America, and virtually non-existent in readily accessible forms, with the only significant deposit being in what is now north central Mexico. Without access to tin it's very difficult to make the jump to bronze, which would likely have proved significantly superior to bone or stone tools.
posted by jedicus at 12:26 PM on March 19, 2021 [30 favorites]

Without access to tin it's very difficult to make the jump to bronze, which would likely have proved significantly superior to bone or stone tools.

Sure, but the article and research talk about why they stopped using copper, not why they didn't start using bronze.
posted by hanov3r at 12:58 PM on March 19, 2021

Right, they hypothesize that a major reason they stopped is that copper alone is (mostly) not better than stone and bone tools and is more difficult to make. Bronze is much better, and that’s why it rapidly replaced copper and stone tools in cultures that developed it, including several in South America. So why didn’t these North American groups? Probably because a necessary component of bronze wasn’t available.

Why they stopped is bound up in the question of what better alternatives were available. I thought it worth mentioning that bronze wasn’t a feasible alternative, which helps explain why a culture with thousands of years of experience with sophisticated metal tool making didn’t go on to use bronze whereas the relative latecomers in Western Asia and the Near East did.
posted by jedicus at 1:15 PM on March 19, 2021 [21 favorites]

9500 years ago, wow!

A commonly cited date for the beginning of the Bronze age is 3000 BC, and the use of copper weapons and tools other than awls ended, according to the link, about 5400 years ago, so there was essentially no overlap.

To get a sense of the amateur archaeology practically boiling over around all this as well as the topography of the Isle Royale area, check out this YouTube video from February, but watch out for the vein of toxic ethnic nationalism (mixed with radical diffusionism) in the comments.
posted by jamjam at 1:56 PM on March 19, 2021

The probably skipped bronze orientation.
posted by migurski at 1:59 PM on March 19, 2021 [5 favorites]

Very interesting. I often can't help but think of how things would be if humanity didn't get all fucked-up on agriculture and metallurgy. Typically that involves fantasizing about ancient American cultures continuing on without being devastated by world-killers "discovering" them. Cool to know metallurgy was once in their grasps but ultimately didn't lead them down the dark metal path.
posted by GoblinHoney at 2:11 PM on March 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

This is totally cool. I had no idea!
(and if the copper around there is unusually pure, they probably didn't have to deal with people complaining about someone selling crappy copper)
posted by rmd1023 at 3:22 PM on March 19, 2021 [7 favorites]

Re: rmd1023's link: "This copper sucks! I'm going to write a strongly worded letter."

This is an interesting and cool post, thank you.
posted by medusa at 3:42 PM on March 19, 2021

Please don't do the thing where Native Americans didnt have agriculture. You're at the very least forgetting about one continental empire based on figuring out potatoes, and another one that turned breeding a grass with slightly fatter seed pods into maize corncobs the size of a child's arm. Oh, they were simple people, living lightly on the land and in harmony with nature. Bullshit. They had cities with tens of thousands of people and giant stone temples for their bureaucrats. You don't get there by gently picking fruit off a tree as you pass by and saying a prayer of thanks to the great spirit.

They just drew a mix of surface metals that were mostly only good for decoration. Try making a nail out of solid pure gold and hammering through a board. Same with raw copper. You can make a spoon that bends against mud, or ceremonial stuff that turns green after a while. Meh.
posted by bartleby at 4:08 PM on March 19, 2021 [11 favorites]

Without access to tin it's very difficult to make the jump to bronze, which would likely have proved significantly superior to bone or stone tools.

They weren't smelting their copper from ore so it's very unlikely they would have been able to use tin, even if there was tin, and even if there was metallic tin naturally occurring. The lack of ore-based metal production is at least as large an impediment to bronze as the lack of raw materials.

Incidentally, naturally occurring metallic copper was also widely used in NW North America, where metallic nuggets of pure copper up to several tons have been found many on the aptly named Copper River. And naturally occurring metallic iron in the form of meteorites was used across the North American Arctic, and other places, including the famous meteoric dagger in Tutankhamen's tomb.
posted by Rumple at 5:11 PM on March 19, 2021 [7 favorites]

That iron dagger found in Tutankhamen's tomb is really spectacular, Rumple!

But I don’t see why metallic tin wouldn’t have allowed Native Americans to produce bronze, since the melting point of bronze is less than half that of copper, and the melting point of tin is less than half of that.

So even if you had trouble getting fires hot enough to melt copper, throwing bits and pieces of copper into melted tin I’d think would produce bronze — as would melting tin in a copper spoon or cup, perhaps.
posted by jamjam at 5:45 PM on March 19, 2021

Most tin deposits are to be found underneath large areas of igneous rock, like granite. Unless you have the tools for hard-rock mining first, you're probably not going to find out about tin.

But yes, I would like to see an alternate timeline, where instead of Columbus, the Great Exchange happens several hundred years earlier, and a very lost shipwreck digorges its cargo of horses, sheep, and Cornishmen. See what develops.
posted by bartleby at 6:03 PM on March 19, 2021

Oops! I was comparing the melting point of copper in degrees F to the melting point of bronze in degrees C; their melting points are actually comparable.
posted by jamjam at 8:04 PM on March 19, 2021 [1 favorite]

Great Lakes Copper is very pure which could lower the firing point a few degrees. Ya, intial thought was the logistics to keep a fixed kiln, while bone and stone can be aquired as easy. Tin? why not pewter. Then the Cornish men would have a ready supply of mugs.
posted by clavdivs at 8:07 PM on March 19, 2021

The question of whether Native Americans could have produced bronze with or without "hard-rock mining" or wayward Cornishmen is moot since we do have a Native American bronze industry in North America, albeit thousands of years and kilometers removed from the Great Lakes. Metallurgists in West Mexico were smelting copper alloys more than 1000 years ago, though they preferred arsenical bronze over the relatively sturdier tin bronze. This may be a result of the aforementioned paucity of tin, but may have been for artistic reasons (cf. Hosler).

The fact that volcanically active central Mexico is home to large deposits of high-quality obsidian may also have played a role. There is an ethnocentric, even whiggish, tendency to think of metal tools as self-evidently superior to their stone counterparts, but this is not always the case. Mesoamerica was home to possibly the most sophisticated lithic toolset in the whole history of humanity, which sets the bar high for a new industry to prove greater utility to the point it would replace the extant modality. West Mexico had a bronze industry for centuries prior to European arrival, but the most common items produced were either small tools (fish-hooks, sewing needles) or artistic/symbolic (bells, "axe monies" ). The impetus to replace the existing lithic industry was lacking, it could be argued, because the metal industry failed to prove superior efficacy.
posted by Panjandrum at 2:57 AM on March 20, 2021 [11 favorites]

> Cool to know metallurgy was once in their grasps but ultimately didn't lead them down the dark metal path.

From Carbon To Metals: the Renewable Energy Transition - "The world is transitioning from a carbon-intensive to a metals-intensive economy. Low-carbon technologies use much larger amounts of metal than traditional fossil fuel-based systems. Demand for metals is thus rising exponentially, fuelling a boom in mining and production. But this creates an environmental challenge."

The World Will Need 10 Million Tons More Copper to Meet Demand - "The copper industry needs to spend upwards of $100 billion to close what could be an annual supply deficit of 4.7 million metric tons by 2030 as the clean power and transport sectors take off, according to estimates from CRU Group. The potential shortfall could reach 10 million tons if no mines get built, according to commodities trader Trafigura Group. Closing such a gap would require building the equivalent of eight projects the size of BHP Group's giant Escondida in Chile, the world's largest copper mine. Used in everything from wiring and pipes to batteries and motors, copper is both an economic bellwether and a key ingredient in the push toward renewable power and electric vehicles."
posted by kliuless at 8:42 AM on March 20, 2021 [2 favorites]