Posted on 02/21/2023 4:27:43 PM PST by SunkenCiv
That's a good question! The availability of copper in an already usable form probably explains how copper came into use in the transition from Neolithic to Chalcolithic to Bronze Age. The manufacture of bronze is complicated though, and just for laughs I'd attribute that development to an unknown ancient craftman who was on the autistic spectrum.
Oddly enough, they didn't. They made use of copper though. By 1492, there was no bronzemaking in the Americas. The Spanish looked for and found tin, and started making bronze cannon. Precolumbian mining of copper though really took off in what is now Michigan, which may be why Central American cultures that made body armor (of a sort) out of cotton never needed to figure out bronze.
They would have, but they didn’t know it was in there, they figured all those weird glass round things in the ceilings were gems of some kind.
If the Romans were in the Canary Islands and the Azores, that could also help explain why what appear to be Roman artifacts were found on Oak Island in Nova Scotia, namely a possible spear point, and more recently, a possible Roman coin (or half of one).
Also a stone road that could possibly be Roman in origin.
The copper mining in the UP ended perhaps a century ago, after the ores were no longer economical. There are still those large pure samples that are off-limits to “collectors”, but they were and are hard to spot, since the boulders they’re in are stony on the outside.
Regarding the trade in copper, which is known because of impurities and isotopes and such, my guess is, as happened east of the Atlantic, there was at least one and probably more than one culture that developed and thrived on long-distance trade, both overland and by sea. The Caribbean islands were *not* settled by people arriving on foot.
Also, there’s this:
https://search.brave.com/search?q=mayans+in+georgia%3F
Probably a mich-mash (heh) of different information, all of it basically true — the Vikings were in the Americas, only the extent of this is now debated. Hrdlicka (sp?) screwed all of us with his jackbooted biased reign. I’ve got one of those old local history vanity books that were sold door-to-door in the late 19th century, actually more than one (packrat behavior is inherited I think), but the one with the red cover opens with a brief chapter on Leif Erickson and Vikings in America.
The copper mining described in this new research peaked 7000 to 9000 years ago, but I’m sure it tottered on for centuries thereafter, so there’s no need for 6000 year old folklore to explain what the Iroquois knew about.
An Upper Peninsula tribe member of my acquaintance told me about his ancestors’ “Rice Wars”, I’m not going to recount that right now, *maybe* there’s something about it online by now, but I doubt it. The word “saguenay” sounds like a French transliteration of some word in one of the local languages, which btw I don’t speak a word of. :^)
Whomever the Old Copper Culture miners were, their descendants probably were wiped out, if indeed the OCC miners weren’t wiped out themselves, thus ending their occupation and commerce. Attacks by the none-too-neighborly neighbors has never been constrained either geographically or temporally.
If the brothers were archaeologists instead of tv show hosts, I might buy that. :^)
Imagine, the most modern non-invasive and invasive techniques for studying subsurface details, and decades of professional excavation, has been defeated over and over again by alleged treasure buriers who appear to have used an old tree branch and some block and tackle.
My pleasure.
https://freerepublic.com/tag/azores/index
https://portuguese-american-journal.com/carthaginian-temples-found-azores/
Carthaginian coins in the Azores:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthaginian_coins_of_Corvo
Vikings in the Azores (other stuff of interest)
https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/History_of_the_Azores#Vikings
“Attacks by the none-too-neighborly neighbors has never been constrained either geographically or temporally.”
Especially when it comes to a valuable and rare commodity like copper.
I worked briefly on a mine in Indonesia (The Grasberg Mine). The deposit was discovered in the 1930’s in a remote area. There was a dome of practically pure copper sticking up out of the ground. (Interesting book about the discovery. First mentioned by one of the early explorers of the area (Cook?) and a mining guy was going through his diaries and then a couple of expeditions to re-find it. The mine (2nd richest in the world?) now extends deep into the ground and includes lots of gold along with the copper.
90 years later the local rebels still keep attacking the facility, and Indonesia still hasn’t given them their Independence like they had promised decades ago.
They’ll never take the copper while they’re alive.
I thought the same until going down the bunny hole after seeing this post.
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