If they worked silver and gold in copious quantities, I assume they also worked copper?
They’re considered stone age, yes. There was a culture in SA that developed into bronze, and much later they think it developed again in west Mexico, possibly via maritime contact with SA, but the two cultures you mention were pretty much stone age. Various cultures around the Americas worked with copper and gold to make decorative items, used as status symbols, but didn’t develop smelting.
I don’t know if they had access to native copper. Although eventually copper smelting did develop in South American and spread to Mesoamerica. This article says the Aztecs did not adopt metalworking. T didn’t mention Mayans.
Here is a YouTube video that discusses the pros and cons of bronze verse iron wrt swords that’s pretty good. The TL&DW version is you have most of it right…bronze makes perfectly fine weapons, and the disadvantages of bending or being soft (compared to modern steel anyway) applied to both bronze and iron weapons during their respective ages. There were some iron age peoples who were able to master iron weapons better than others, and a well made and crafted iron sword had some advantages over bronze, but the real differentiation was availability, as you said…bronze (or copper and tin) weren’t as available as iron, even though iron took more resources to actually produce. Obvious when we get to steel it’s a new ballgame, as you could make a steel sword longer and more flexible than either bronze or iron, and also you had more options (given more technology and craft) for the edge. I think a lot of folks under rate bronze, but it was a very good material for it’s time for crafting weapons and armor. A lot of modern bronze that’s used for decorative items are softer, but you could change the hardness of the bronze by varying the mix of the alloy, and IIRC the Chinese could do some really interesting things with alloys of bronze and their weapons.
When I was at the University of Minnesota there was a grad student who built a giant clay oven to smelt iron. He got Kingsford to donate the charcoal. The smelter was able to produce iron, it just wasn’t the best quality.
They used little in the way of metal tools or weapons, so yes, stone age. They did use copper (and gold and silver, of course) for decoration, and a little bit of bronze.
Incorrrect, or at least highly debatable. Indigenous use of iron in the Arctic did not comprise of a few ornamental trinkets, but an important technological advancement, eagerly adopted and widespread. Here in Fennoscandia, early use of iron - very few iron artefacts total - signals the beginning of the Iron Age, as it should. Even small amounts of iron is a game changer.
A stone scraper dulls in 20 minutes of scraping skins, is resharpened once and then unusable, so gets replaced by another, ad infinitum, and all of them survive in the soil almost indefinetely. An iron scraper sees thousands of hours of use, and once worn down to a stub is used for some other purpose. When even that use is exhausted and the tool is discarded, it readily oxidizes on or in the ground, and most are gone within a couple of millennia. Concrete evidence of iron use therefore never matches the ancient realities. Myriad ethnographic accounts depict the ferver bits of metal created among (former) Stone Age people. Stone blades cast into the river to make room for metal, shirt sold off one’s back for a small knife etc.
Five tons of bronze is easier to haul in many different carts than as one single piece.
So, where is your cite?
The Renaissance at War by Thomas Arnold 2001
Or do you need a cite that a heavy load is easier to transport when broken up?
Well, thats a whole book. maybe a online cite we can check?
No, but then smelting bronze into a cannon requires you have a smelter and a mold.
Here’s one where they hauled on of the largest cannons ever, rather than break it up and recast. The Guns of Constantinople
The knowledge came from the book. So there it is.
Found the reference. The book qualifies the practice of breaking up pieces for later recasting by adding, “for when an army needed to beat a quick retreat.” So maybe not normal siege practice. But not unheard of.
Well, OK, I can buy that. And if you get overtaken, they dont get cannons just hunks of bronze.
Here’s a link about the switch from bronze to iron for cannons in Elizabethan England.
They were melting, not smelting.
Yes. And now you understand why the 3 Ages system is crap.
I didn’t say they did.
No argument here.
Nope. Some (imported) iron artefacts pop up in the Nordic Bronze Age already, doesn’t signal the change to Iron Age. That only starts in ~500 BCE once local production kicks in, diffusing from Denmark (via contacts with Hallstatt Culture), into the Peninsula.
And a lack of iron artefacts is only remarkable if there’s a wealth of other artefacts - but that period is called the Findless Age for a reason.
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Totally agree. The issue here isn’t with whether use of iron happens, or matters. The issue is with what constitutes “dominant” usage.
You say this like we can’t distinguish between stone and metal tooling marks and are only dependent on actual tool finds…
It’s a fine way to sort artifacts for a Danish cabinet of curiosities.
But those three ages are irrelevant in the Americas. In Mesoamerica, it’s Pre-Classic, Classic & Post-Classic. (With subdivisions.)
At last there’s a discussion about something I have personally researched! This is just a drive by to mention that one writer comments that “Thule culture could, with little exaggeration, be called an “iron age” culture.” He was referring to the fact that the Inuit of Western Greenland had access to iron, not only from the Cape York Meteorite, but also A) a source of raw iron found in pea size lumps in basalt at Disko Island, 800km to the south, and B) smelted iron that could be obtained from Norse settlements yet further south.
(McGhee, R. 1984 ‘Contact between Native North Americans and the Medieval Norse: A Review of the Evidence’, American Antiquity 49, 4-26.)