BTW, several years back I bought a block lot of a few kilos of unclassifed NWAs for under 10 cents per gram. Some of them were really nice but probably part of the beautiful but abundant NWA 869. Some of them were very weathered and ugly and possibly fell tens of thousands of years ago. But one piece really caught my attention. It is a significantly weathered chondrite but not nearly as bad as the worst of the batch. One side is fusion-crusted and the other not, and the flat edges are considerably sharp because of the edge of that fusion crust. I can’t prove that the shape isn’t random and natural, but the size and shape are highly suggestive of something that has been deliberately shaped into a tool such as a spear-point, possibly thousands of years ago.
I made these photos and videos today.
No. The Sudbury area hasn’t been the largest nickel producer in the world for some time, and Canada definitely doesn’t have the largest reserves. Laterite mining has overtaken sulphide mining in a big way, and that means the tropics now dominate Ni production.
Nickle is mainly produced from magmatic and laterite ore deposits, and Canada is the third place producer, behind Indonesia and the Philippines:
If it only came from meteorites, I couldn’t imagine it being as cheap as it is. Meteorite deposits are an important source of osmium and iridium, which are considered precious metals.
A charcoal fire with some forced air is sufficiently hot to forge iron. The same fires used to produce and cast bronze would do the job on iron. The metal doesn’t need to be hot enough to melt, only to become plastic where it can be pounded into shape, and at that temperature it can be forge welded also.
I can’t find the reference again, but in on discussion about the iron blade in King Tut’s tomb it was mentioned (hypothesized?) that the meteorites came from the Sahara desert. Apparently even to this day people in the Sahara find meteorites and hang on to them. Mostly for tourists now, but back the day, they were a convenient source of iron. Though according to Youtube, hard to work with.
Tut’s knife is a match for a meteorite named Kaharga, found in 2000.
I just found this PDF on Bronze Age meteoritic iron, which includes:
If only someone had mentioned those–several times–earlier in this thread…
Yes. If you watch a blacksmith forming horseshoes - they use a fire with a bellows, and once the iron piece is red-hot, it can be hammered into shape with a bit of effort. I don’t imagine it was a stretch for those making bronze to figure out that with a bellows they could make their fire hotter; it just wasn’t that necessary until they figured out iron. I wonder whether to some working extent meteoric iron contributed to that discovery? “The hotter I make it, the easier to hammer it to shape.”
(This BTW is the mistake made by conspiracy theorists over 9-11 and building collapse. “A fire with jet fuel won’t get hot enough to melt iron.” True, but iron turn to a taffy consistency far below melting point, and loses its strength.)
NB the Inuit and the Dorset culture in and near Greenland didn’t have fires that were that hot (they didn’t make pottery IIRC), so their small tools were mostly made from hammering the cold iron.
Actually bellows were’t invented until the 5th century BC, and then it was in China. It didn’t reach the west for a long time after that. I’m not sure what they used to get forges hotter before they had bellows.
That’s incorrect. Pot bellows in Egypt go back to at least a millennium earlier (cite) This paintingis from the tomb of Rekhmire, circa 1450 BCE.
Similarly-aged pot bellows have also been found in Cyprus
There likely were also leather bag bellows, but evidence for those is lacking.
Of course, before that, blowpipes were used. You can get a very hot fire with just a blowpipe.
Actually, I was conservative, the Tell edh Dhibai(in modern Baghdad) pot bellows date to 1800 BCE.
So it isn’t the size of the tool, it’s the hardness of the iron?
Well, and also how you use it.
It ain’t the size of the hammer, it’s the heat of the [DEL][COLOR=“Black”]meat[/DEL][/COLOR] metal.
CMC fnord!
Here is the dopeon Pratchett’s sword.
I guess the point would be, the hotter the iron, the more plastic it would be; and it is can be formed all the way down to room temperature if you hammer hard enough often enough. My suggestion would be that people making bronze would have some clever ideas for blowing on fires to make them hotter. They just did not need the extreme heat that melted/smelted iron until they figured that part out. Until then, a simple fire or better would suffice for working it. In the days before twitter craftsmen had plenty of time to thing and contemplate things. I assume they had considered the fact that generally metals got softer with heat and applied it to weird metals they had found lying in the desert.
I expect that, even before Twitter, most craftsmen probably just used the same techniques their master used, and passed the same techniques on to their apprentices in turn, and scoffed at the idea of trying anything new. But the thing is, it only takes a few to figure out new things, and teach the others.
I wonder if working it would have left any signs in the microstructure. And if there are any non-destructive analytical techniques for determining this.
Sorry!
I promise I thought I had read the thread up to the point where I started my entry and those posts weren’t there. I probably just missed them, but this happens to me a lot. I write a post and it ends up much further down the chain than I expected. Makes me look slow…
Not a problem, the same thing happens to me a lot.
As for the OP, I see that you are in California–here is a page on California finds. If you really want to look for meteorites, the best bet is to look in spots where they have been found before. It would help if you had a copy of this and knew how to not die in the desert.