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Working metal is a neat trick. You don't find iron everywhere. You'd need to get all the way to Otsego NY for mineable rock which was arguably accessible from the surface ~ they mined it in tunnels.

Manassas Virginia is the next site South where it would have been easy to get at.

The mineable iron in Pittsburgh was found by folks who knew what to look for ~

Copper is another story ~ go to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan ~ it's just laying around, as it was in SE Indiana, and a couple of other spots. However, you need zinc or tin to make it really useful.

Another item ~ the East Coast of North America is highly acidic. These guys could have been turning out all sorts of iron implements, but they'd been dissolved into the soil by the time other Europeans got here.

If there were just 20 years of delay between their arrival in America and their ability to settle in one spot (rather than wander around fighting Iroquois, Mohicans and others, the old timers with the knowledge would have been gone!

"Working metal is a neat trick. You don't find iron everywhere. You'd need to get all the way to Otsego NY for mineable rock which was arguably accessible from the surface ~ they mined it in tunnels."

I just finished a book by the guy who excavated the Viking settlement at L'Anse Aux Meadows. He pointed out that the vikings frequently used "bog ore" for their iron work. I wasn't familiar with the term before, but bog ore is found around bogs and springs with iron-bearing ground water. L'Anse Aux Meadows had an abundance of bog ore and they found evidence of a smithy there.

The author also believed there were at least three other trips to L'Anse Aux Meadows by Vikings after Leif Erikson, based on information he gleaned from some of the Icelandic sagas (he pointed out that there are no known surviving examples of literature from Greenland).