Africa/Egyptian presence and jewelry in Mesoamerica?
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Minimalist
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...and the Giza Pyramids as being built as tombs and tombs only by 4th dynasty Egyptians using copper chisels and big ramps in 20 years!
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
-- George Carlin
-- George Carlin
Min:
Your posts were about tin.
I am pretty sure the UK and Asian sites produced enough tin.
It takes a lot more copper than tin to make bronze.
So the copper is the key part of the puzzle.
The Lake Superior mine workers left nothing behind but tools.
Strangely, in two styles. The maul heads differ in being single grooved in the peninsula and being double grooved on Isle Royal.
This opens the possibility of two different groups mining in the same area but perhaps being different cultures and possibly shipping by different routes.
I don’t believe they have even found camp sites.
The only burned wood is in some of the pits where it was used to heat the rock prior to be splashed with water to shatter it.
The guess is that it was a short summer season work period,
With the workers retreating to the South for the winter.
The Wisconsin mounds and effigies are in the milder Southern 1/3 of the state.
And all in the Mississippi watershed.
They seem to be the farthest North year around settlements.
But the lack of trade goods found in an purely hunter gather and nomadic “Indian” context leads some to think the mining was done by imported labor that only traded with the locals for food. Maybe even for prepared meals.
That would have been cheaper than paying for the mining and would allow more time for the actual digging.
A “non-Indian” work force would also explain the “non-Indian” style of their year around settlements down the Mississippi.
I know of no evidence of a corresponding string of “non-Indian” settlements along a trade route through the Great Lakes and St Lawrence waterway.
Your posts were about tin.
I am pretty sure the UK and Asian sites produced enough tin.
It takes a lot more copper than tin to make bronze.
So the copper is the key part of the puzzle.
The Lake Superior mine workers left nothing behind but tools.
Strangely, in two styles. The maul heads differ in being single grooved in the peninsula and being double grooved on Isle Royal.
This opens the possibility of two different groups mining in the same area but perhaps being different cultures and possibly shipping by different routes.
I don’t believe they have even found camp sites.
The only burned wood is in some of the pits where it was used to heat the rock prior to be splashed with water to shatter it.
The guess is that it was a short summer season work period,
With the workers retreating to the South for the winter.
The Wisconsin mounds and effigies are in the milder Southern 1/3 of the state.
And all in the Mississippi watershed.
They seem to be the farthest North year around settlements.
But the lack of trade goods found in an purely hunter gather and nomadic “Indian” context leads some to think the mining was done by imported labor that only traded with the locals for food. Maybe even for prepared meals.
That would have been cheaper than paying for the mining and would allow more time for the actual digging.
A “non-Indian” work force would also explain the “non-Indian” style of their year around settlements down the Mississippi.
I know of no evidence of a corresponding string of “non-Indian” settlements along a trade route through the Great Lakes and St Lawrence waterway.
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Minimalist
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Copper does not seem to have been that scarce in the ancient mideast that they would have had to inaugurate a cross ocean trade to obtain it, kb.
http://www.unr.edu/sb204/geology/history.html
http://www.unr.edu/sb204/geology/history.html
In addition to the important copper deposits of Cyprus, copper is relatively common around the Mediterranean. It was found in nuggets and masses on the surface of the earth, adjacent to streams, in the walls of canyons. Although exposure to weather changes copper's reddish color to blue-green, it is easy to recognize. Ancient people learned that copper could be shaped by pressure, that is, it is "malleable."
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
-- George Carlin
-- George Carlin
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Minimalist
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We'll never hear the end of this!
http://www.dragonseedcave.com/copperhistory.htm
During these ancient Mesopotamian times, copper was associated with the Queen of Heaven as well as to goddesses Inanna, and later Ishtar and Astarte
Beats me on the Inca. That, again, seems like an awfully long way to go for a mineral which is as common as copper apparently is.
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
-- George Carlin
-- George Carlin
Old Yakut proverb:Minimalist wrote:
We'll never hear the end of this!
http://www.dragonseedcave.com/copperhistory.htm
During these ancient Mesopotamian times, copper was associated with the Queen of Heaven as well as to goddesses Inanna, and later Ishtar and Astarte
“A shaman's wife is respectable; a smith’s wife is venerable.”
According to the Dolgan, shamans cannot “swallow” the souls of smiths because they keep their souls in the fire. On the other hand, a smith can catch a shaman’s soul and burn it.
In other words, the smiths were more powerful than the shamans.
The Buryat smiths practised the horse sacrifice, and the soul of the horse went to the celestial smith, Boshintoi.
According to the Buryat, the nine sons of Boshintoi, the celestial smith, came down to earth to teach men metallurgy.
Boshintoi’s sons married daughters of the earth, and thus became ancestors of the smiths; no one can become a smith unless he is descended from one of these families.
Secret societies of smiths have been found among the ancient Germans, the Japanese and even in Africa. Some smiths are founders of Chinese dynasties. And the smith also appears in Scandinavian, European and Celtic folklore, but the Christians often turned him into a dark force or a devil with flames shooting from his mouth.
(Most of this comes from Mircea Eliade's Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.)
The argument is that, while copper was common enough to let the people of the Mid- East and Mediterranean learn to use it, and later learn to mix it with tin, there was not the quantity needed locally for the huge arms industry of the Bronze Age.
Thus the need to find it in larger deposits.
The numbers around the Lake Superior mines are large beyond belief.
Hundreds of thousands of tons and tens of thousands of man years.
It had to go some where.
The Inca use was never for tools or weapons.
Strictly jewelry.
That was pretty much true of all their metallurgy.
I believe their bronze was made with local tin.
I don’t know that anyone has determined if they learned it from someone of if it was an independent discovery.
There is some thought that the Central America demand was filled from the New Mexico and Arizona area, but that that trade dried up when the copper in Chile was found closer.
Thus the need to find it in larger deposits.
The numbers around the Lake Superior mines are large beyond belief.
Hundreds of thousands of tons and tens of thousands of man years.
It had to go some where.
The Inca use was never for tools or weapons.
Strictly jewelry.
That was pretty much true of all their metallurgy.
I believe their bronze was made with local tin.
I don’t know that anyone has determined if they learned it from someone of if it was an independent discovery.
There is some thought that the Central America demand was filled from the New Mexico and Arizona area, but that that trade dried up when the copper in Chile was found closer.
http://history-world.org/inca.htm
[/quote]The Inca use was never for tools or weapons.
Strictly jewelry. [quote]
There would appear to be some disagreement here.
[/quote]The Inca use was never for tools or weapons.
Strictly jewelry. [quote]
There would appear to be some disagreement here.
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Minimalist
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Digit wrote:But is it common at the surface Min. Some surrent copper mines are amongst the world's deepest holes in the ground.
How deep could the Egyptians have dug? We know they had copper.
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
-- George Carlin
-- George Carlin
Well, Wikipedia does mention bronze spearheads, but evidently not very widespread.
Certainly not the swords, spears, helmets, and armor of the Mediterranean.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incas
Certainly not the swords, spears, helmets, and armor of the Mediterranean.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incas
That is kind of my point Digit.
The Inca were not a metal oriented society in everyday life.
The Spanish would not have been very impressed with bronze, if it had been around, when there was so much gold and silver around.
So there would still be relics to be found, if they existed.
But they do not.
Of course
“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
But the amount of copper indicates an amount of bronze that has not been found in the Western Hemisphere.
The Inca were not a metal oriented society in everyday life.
The Spanish would not have been very impressed with bronze, if it had been around, when there was so much gold and silver around.
So there would still be relics to be found, if they existed.
But they do not.
Of course
“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
But the amount of copper indicates an amount of bronze that has not been found in the Western Hemisphere.