And here is a tale of a successful meteorite hunt in California dry lakes. There are other locations in the US still giving up meteorites, though. For instance Arizonaand Kansas. (And probably a few bits left over in places like Park Forest, and West.)
(BTW, while digging up links I noticed the freshest known meteorite fall in the world–all of six days ago.)
I guess my point being - the craftsmen of ancient times were not lacking in smarts or imagination; they simply had no need for excessively hot fires. They probably figured out a certain amount of forced air made a hotter fire and sped up the process of melting the common metals the worked with - copper, tin, gold, silver… But until someone maybe got super-clever (or overdid the forced air one day) and discovered how to melt iron, hot enough to work was all that was necessary, and not doing much more than necessary is an efficient trait. Plus, it was probably an accident that someone found out that iron oxide converted to iron in sufficient heat.
Possibly related to ceramics or glassmaking. It’s probably no coincidence that iron oxides are a source of colour for both pottery and glass…
Fire and furnace technology was developed for pottery for thousands of years before copper smelting was discovered.
And iron age furnaces were not intended to melt iron - it was more than 2000 years before we could do that in the west. Instead, they created a deoxidizing environment and melted off the unwanted stony compounds in the ore. This left a lump of soft but still solid iron.
Australian nomads didn’t pick up and carry things around. it’s fairly obvious on reflection, but early European settlers were surprised that when given useful and valuable gits, the nomads would just discard them.
I don’t know what the weather is like in Greenland, but you can walk around and pick up meteorites in parts of Antarctica, as in other deserts.
I wonder if desert glass debris fields were used as meteorite indicators in Egypt.
Those poor gits.
The bulk of meteorites in Antarctica are found in very specific situations where flowing glaciers bump up against mountains and are stopped–winds then sublimate ice from the stalled glaciers, eroding down to meteorites that have fallen over thousands of years and leaving them behind, vastly more concentrated than on any other random stretch of glacier. But the area needs to have mainly sublimation of the ice and not melting, because melting drops the meteorites below the surface again. Searches have been made in Greenland for meteorite traps similar to Antarctica, and promising area have been found, but they have so far as I know all been busts because of too much melting.
Iron meteorite finds are unusually low in Antarctica too, but (probably) not because of ancient Antarctic tool makers but because even in Antarctica irons may get warm enough to melt themselves below the surface.
(And once again book recommendation time.)
Libyan desert glass (the kind found in Tut’s tomb) is millions of years old, vastly too old to led to useful meteorite material. There are small areas of fused glass and meteoritic iron in the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia, but that impact is likely only a few hundred years old.
Let us not forget about bog iron. A possibly good source for iron in wet environments. And it was a potentially richer source since it is caused by ongoing processes in one spot rather than widely scattered random locations.
When talking about trinkets owned by the rulers of tens or hundreds of thousands of square miles, gathered over time frames of thousands of years, super rarity becomes less of a factor. What goes for you doesn’t translate to what goes for Cyrus the Great.
Getting iron metal from bog iron requires smelting technology.
Which was mostly unavailable in the OP’s stipulated timeperiod of Bronze Age.
Smelting, by the way, does not actually melt the iron, it is a redhot chemical process that strips the oxygen off iron oxides.
The resultant iron is not in melted form but a sort of putty-like substance with many impurities embedded in it, which get removed by, basically, pounding the heck out of it.
But it does require a very respectable heat, and some very careful chemistry in the furnace. The invention of which techniques and their application is basically the dividing line where iron age begins!
Actually melting metallic iron without shielding it from atmospheric oxygen is very counter-productive, unless you work with multi-ton batches where surface oxidation losses are trivial compared to the bulk.
It also requires quite obscene levels of heat, that are very difficult to achieve when your best fuel is just charcoal.
It’s not impossible but is at the very upper end of possibility requiring tricks like pre-heated hot air bellows, etc.
A normal charcoal fire is too cold to melt iron by a good 200C-250C, even with the best air bellows available.
Hmm, sounds familiar.
Ancient metal-workers were familiar with the smelting and melting of metals; and were well aware that different substances required differing amounts of heat. Melting and casting of copper and bronze was practiced well before 3000 BC, and smelting of copper ores much earlier than that.
Surely there would have been huge incentive to produce the high temperatures needed to smelt iron ore, or to melt the metal.
According to this source, iron was smelted by 2500 BC. Surely there was a huge desire to reproduce that recipe.
I always like it when Dopers throw in stuff that I mostly know but also add in something I didn’t. So …
Bog iron. Check.
Meteorite iron. Check.
Telluric iron. Che…, wait. I did not know about this one. Cool.
That’s what we used to think. As it turns out the ability to smelt iron was developed fairly early in the Bronze Age. It wasn’t used commonly because so much more fuel was needed to smelt copper and make bronze. It is believed that the increasing cost of copper and tin ores which are not as widely available as iron ore pushed the world into the Iron Age.
Smelting iron doesn’t require great heat. Simple bloomeries didn’t even need forced air. By smelting at a low temperatures the iron would not take up as much carbon from the fuel make it a stronger more ductile material, sometimes resulting in crude steel from certain ores.