Aztalan

Youngest Son and I went to Aztalan yesterday. It's a pity Van Buren wasn't interested in preserving the site, though it would have been amateur-excavated for souvenirs in any case; modern archaeology being, well, modern. One of the signs asserted that the population was about 300, which I gather they estimated from the fraction of the enclosed area devoted to housing and the number of posthole clusters they found for housing.

I wonder about that. The stockade (the outer one, anyhow, that they found postholes for) was about 2700 feet long, with "wattle and daub" to fill in the gaps between logs. That doesn't include defenses in or along the river, whose traces the Crawfish River would have obliterated long ago. And my own rough estimate comes up with room for more like 2-3000, though that estimate includes kids--so maybe 300 able-bodied men is reasonable.

And, pet peeve, they gave no estimates for how many people lived outside the city walls.

The mounds and stockade were built with stone tools. I'm not sure exactly how long it would take to cut down, trim, and haul the couple of thousand trees to build it. (Harder if the area was intensively used before hand, meaning they'd have to haul trees farther.) If it took a day for two men to cut/trim/haul a tree, that's about 4-5000 man-days for the stockade. You need farmers and fishermen too, so if you can spare a team of 20 to work on the job that's a couple of years of work (not in the winter or harvest time)--less than I expected. And then there's the weaving of small branches and vines, and the mud fill...

One of the mounds was a low kame that the residents built up a little, and one of the low mounds is almost completely gone. The others have been excavated and reconstructed.

They abandoned the city about the same time Cahokia was abandoned--something went sideways for the Mississippians, well before Columbus. People lived in the area for thousands of years, apparently, but the city was fairly recent. Figuring out what age the building postholes fit into is a bit tricky, especially since the area was heavily plowed for a while.

This part of the world doesn't have much in the way of ancient stone monuments.

Archaeology of play

Some Sami stone circles were made by children, not priests.

The default explanation for things archeologists don't understand is that "it's religious."

Fortunately the Sami knew about them: "The local representative who accompanied Thomassen even showed him the place where his great-grandfather had made circles like these when he was a child."

I'd like to say "I told you so," and if I could remember when I posted about hard-to-classify artifacts, I would. Kids build too. I know I did. Their artifacts shouldn't last as long, being made of things children can carry, but accidents can preserve things.

Mammoth hunting

How did the paleoIndians kill mammoths? Clearly they did--there are bones with spear points in them--and thoroughly enough that there aren't anymore mammoths. Elephant hide is almost half an inch thick, and mammoths corpses have twice that. Even with an atlatl you're not going to get a quick kill through that. You'd need lots of spears--and a wounded mammoth might have opinions about that--or lots of time for the critter to bleed out. And then you have to skin it pretty quickly, before the guts start to spoil the meat.

Frison published an article in American Antiquity (Vol 54) in 1989: "Experimental Use of Clovis Weaponry and Tools on African Elephants" based on work from a few years earlier. (Found via this post.)

The team took advantage of an elephant cull to have freshly dead and as yet unskinned elephants to test the tools on. Turns out Clovis points are kind of fragile (archaeologists knew this already), and getting the spear to hold together properly takes some care. You have to design it right, and even then you may have to rework the spear or the point after use. They did some slinging from 15 to 20 meters--two to three seconds away at elephant top speed.

"Proper use of the atlatl and dart requires considerable movement on the part of the hunter. ... In the case of actual hunting, this movement would very likely attract the attention of an animal whose subsequent reactions would not always be entirely predictable."

"Clovis weaponry cannot be depended on to drop quickly and reliably a charging matriarch or even younger and smaller elephants"

"Individual members of an elephant family continually wander away from the protection of the matriarch and the family. Careful stalking of such animals would put the hunter in a favorable spot to inflict crippling or lethal wounds that would eventually lead to the deaths without arousing the suspicion of the matriarch and bringing to bear the unbrella of protection offered by the family. This kind of procurement strategy involves careful stalking, a minimum of noise and excitement, and patience once a spear has inflicted a wound on the animal."

There's footage of an isolated elephant being brought down with spears by a group of Africans, without atlatls (there's no evidence they ever used them there). I can't swear to the provenance of that footage, though.

Frison tested butchering too. It was straightforward; even the legs came apart fairly easily. But you still need a lot of people, even if only to carry the meat away.

Yes, we went to Horicon today.

Shroud

The Shroud of Turin apparently has been controversial for quite a while. (My guess about how it might have formed was tested a few years after my post.)

A SciTechDaily post gleefully cites Nicole Oresme's claim that ‘I do not need to believe anyone who claims: “Someone performed such miracle for me,” because many clergy men thus deceive others, in order to elicit offerings for their churches. ‘This is clearly the case for a church in Champagne, where it was said that there was the shroud of the Lord Jesus Christ, and for the almost infinite number of those who have forged such things, and others.’

The article doesn't quote Oresme's reasons for holding the Shroud to be fake, just cites his conclusion. Maybe that's all we have, and if the item was fashioned about that era he might have had access to provenance information we don't.

I'm a bit dubious about attributing it to Jesus' burial, because it doesn't seem to match John's description. I could be wrong, of course.

Dish washing time

My wife was watching a Time Team episode in which the archaeologists were looking at pottery fragments--pottery that had been tempered with bits of crushed pottery, leaving a surface that looked pretty ugly. But I guess it held up to heat OK.

Anyhow, the first thing that came to my mind was: how do you clean that? No soap, though you could scrub with ash. Or sand, but that'd be pretty abrasive, the more so if the surface is already uneven. Frayed stick ends would scrub pretty well.

This Facebook conversation proposes some things I'd never heard of before--such as seasoning the inside with starch, and that they may have had partial survivor's immunity to some of the diseases and so cleaning wasn't so critical. (Dunno about that last--cleaning your pots would give you an edge over the tribe that didn't, and in South America they devised thorough ways of getting the last cyanide out of their cassava--that last little edge is important.)

Cleaning up doesn't seem to get quite the same attention as hunting or fighting or fabrication or cooking. But without it...

Following up on the topic of cleanliness, I tried googling for indian longhouse chamber pot, and Google's AI hallucinated at me. I figure there had to be something customary, especially in large settlements like Cahokia.

As long as it wasn't buried too deeply

Apparently people came back to Pompeii after the Roman era eruption. Some buildings were taller than 20 feet, so a few things would stick out and mark the place clearly. Scavenging might be possible in somewhat sheltered areas, and I'd guess there would have been some rites possible for the already-buried dead family members.

And in a few years the land nearby would be fertile. Rain would tend to thicken and eventually harden the ash, so the window for digging might not be very long. But there'd be some worked stone handy.

Raised beds

Drone-mounted lidar found "raised bed" lines at The Sixty Islands site on the Menominee River that seem to date from about 1000 to 1600AD. That takes in the both Medieval Warm period and part of the Little Ice Age, and in soil that's generally pretty poor, and with a short growing season. An earlier study found maize phytoliths in one bed, so they were growing at least some corn in a region at the hairy edge of doing so. A different study found a bit of charred maize dated to about 1400--in between the high and low temperature periods.

The raised-bed ridges apparently were used and rebuilt repeatedly (sometimes mixing in soil from nearby wetlands). Composting from kitchen waste made them more fertile -- and harder to date. The novelty of this paper lies in using lidar to discover the true extent of the cultivated area--possibly 10 times bigger than expected.

The Science article notes the evidence of maize being grown, and presumes they grew other things. The Cosmos article assumes that the forest environment would make it hard to grow crops--which is silly; they'd deforested the area, as the Science article says, by 1000AD.

An earlier study found maize phytoliths, which being silica don't tell much about DNA. I wonder if they had different breeds more tolerant of the shorter growing season and unexpected frosts, and presumably lower yield, too.

Since wild rice was available, I wonder if corn was a luxury trading crop.

Poverty Point

Poverty Point was a bit too far out of the way for us last year, unfortunately. It's an ancient Indian earthwork site: built up between 1700 and 1100 BC. Much older than Cahokia, but younger than the pyramids of Egypt, and older than the MesoAmerican pyramids. One section dates back to 3900 to 3600 BC (beats the pyramids).

A TimeTeam video about a resistivity study came up in my wife's feed. There's speculation, and the study supplies some support for the idea, that the central plaza was built over a couple of (now extinct) mud volcanoes. Given the myths recorded later about people emerging from the earth--location, location, location: build something there.

One thing didn't make sense: a claim that the big mound (A) was built in 3 months. 238,000 cubic meters? I looked up the reference, and they concluded that the lack of obvious erosion or layering in the cores they took (in an area with plenty of rainfall), meant that "we cannot falsify the hypothesis the mound was built in less than three months."

Um. There seem to be other estimates. If you assume 50lb baskets, two per carrying pole (guessing that the locals invented them too), and that whether it was 1 digger and 1 porter or one doing both jobs and taking twice as long, that's about .05 m3 in maybe 40 minutes, and over 3 million man-trips. Give people a day off each week, and that's about 15,000 man-months. I've no intuition for how many people you could scrounge up to do that kind of work, but you'll need to feed them, so maybe double or triple the number to produce the food, and more to prepare it. Nominally this is before much agriculture (e.g. way before corn is found there), though I'll bet there was some, of quasi-wild varieties.

Not three months.

It looks like a very interesting site, and a long-lived one too. 2800 years of use. They estimate the last work was roughly about the same era is the famous collapses in the MidEast about 1200BC. China had some droughts about then, so maybe the Americas did too.

Unfamiliar symbols

"Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!" I wonder if any of those silver images of the temple are still around. There are statues of Artemis still around; she seems to have canes in her hands (canes are also seen in a crude lead figure, so if it was a stability artifact it was in the original--it looks top heavy). No idea what that was taken to mean. The Artemis has a garment with lions and cows and antelopes and whatnot, and women on the sides--small breasted, possibly to avoid competition with the vast array of breasts the goddess sported. I assume the multitude of breasts has to do with fertility and providing for the world. The effect is remarkably ugly.

I haven't turned up any silver images of the temple. Probably all were melted long ago.

One of the images of Artemis' head has her eyes rolled up in an expression that seems almost Hindu--which wouldn't be terribly surprising. The city clerk spoke of an image fallen from heaven. Was that a special inner shrine with a meteorite, or had stories been told that this top-heavy thing had really fallen from the sky?

I’ve suggested before that polytheism is the compromise you get when different tribes with different gods met. I think it can work a bit the other way too. If you have a pile of gods you have to keep up with the appropriate seasonal rituals with each, but perhaps one takes your fancy--say Krishna. I suspect that the more people are devoted to a single god in the pantheon, the more that one will take on aspects that others are nominally the managers of. A fertility goddess could easily pick up aspects of wrath, and even of battle--if people cared about her enough. (Priests might have a little competition going here too--one stop shopping, get all your prayers done here...)

Be that as it may, I look at the statue and find it opaque. And this is the relic of a literate people, from whom we have many documents--there's some connection between us still. And then I look at the pictures at Göbekli Tepe. Wild guesses, all.

Great was Artemis of the Ephesians Wright's site has a picture of what's left: a mismatched column with a stork's nest on top. The ruins of the temple were scavenged to build a basillica, and eventually the ruins of that for a mosque, and the mosque isn't in great shape now either.

Argentine Armadillo Abattoir Question

AVI found a report about what looks like 19,000BC butchery in far South America. Why, he asks, did such early humans not do in the megafauna, as later ones seem to have done (though there are claims for climate change and meteors, and possibly all-of-the-above)?

I've seen a few artists' reconstructions showing fur-clad proto-Indians doing in mammoths. The weapons are generally spears, and spear points show up in mammoth bones. I don't recall seeing any images that included another tool, developed about 21,000BC (perhaps not in time for the earliest waves into the Americas): dogs.

I'd think it would be much safer and more effective to go after a mega-critter with a spear after it has been nicely tired out by your own private wolf-pack, or while it is confused which foe to face first.

I wonder how you'd estimate the effectiveness of hunting a lone mammoth (not going to have much success attacking a herd) with and without dogs to chivvy it. Without practicing various tactics on elephants, of course.

UPDATE: Found a picture.

Effigy Mounds

In Aspects of Winnebago Archaeology Radin tries to show, among other things, that the effigy mounds were built by Winnebago, some of them as recently as the 18'th century, and were clan property markers. They didn't have radiocarbon dating then, though they did have the testimony of Winnebago elders who died over a hundred years ago and are no longer available for interview. Those elders also unanimously said that they have never known how to make the stone arrowheads found all over the place--those were made by earthworms. They sometimes used them, but only when found.

I have a nagging suspicion that "earthworms" was a euphemism for something secret.

Circumstantial evidence can be unreliable, but so can testimony.

Pottery

An archaeologist on a video I was watching explained how very many pottery fragments they found, and how big the village was, and I thought "That's about a bowl a month per household gone smash!" We break cups and plates around here too, but not so many as that.

OK, our china is probably more robust than their pottery. The shell bits and other stuff in the pot below are for tempering so it doesn't crack in the heat when you hang it over a fire. It doesn't look terribly robust.

But look at it (late Anglo-Saxon, British Museum). Imagine trying to scrub it clean if something gets caked on. I suppose if it got used every day you wouldn't get strange things growing in it, but it doesn't seem altogether appetizing to be eating "Pease porridge in the pot nine days old". And if it was as fragile as it looks, cleaning it would be a daily risk.

Maybe a bowl a month is about right.

Ancient steel

AVI sent me a link about an iron chisel (900BC) from Rocha do Vigio (Portugal), which possibly was effectively tempered steel.

The paper has more details about the chisel (they were able to do studies on the haft, but because they are destructive, not on the tip) and their attempts to reproduce the stelae that seem to date from that era also: plus or minus a couple of centuries (some say 1300-800BC, others 1000-600BC). The rocks were of an extremely hard varieties of quartzite and quartz-sandstone. They tried stone chisels, which worked about as well as you'd expect. They tried replica iron chisels made using the processes they knew were in use--some hardened by heating and quenching, and one left unhardened. The unhardened one didn't do much of anything. The hardened ones did, though they had to be resharpened every 5 minutes, and re-hardened after a while too. And:

Specimens in four representative binary alloys with 10, 12, 14 and 16% tin have been cast by Bastian Asmus, ... The unambiguous result on the quartz-sandstone was that none of the bronzes could penetrate the surface

I'll get back to that in a moment. It does sound like the sculptors needed something better than one of the out-of-the-box iron chisels of the area.

The iron chisel they found was in spectacularly good shape--when they did a section of it the bulk of the artifact was uncorroded. They could determine the chemical makeup of different regions of the chisel. It looked rather as though an inhomogenous bloom was hammered into a blob that was made into a chisel. Some sections were high carbon, others not so much. Maybe they paid better attention to the tip, but if the haft makeup is any guide it seems as though they weren't being systematic with the iron makeup.

I suspect that a lot of technological progress now and in the past has come about when men were "just playing around." You can come up with a just-so story or three for discovering what can happen (if the iron happens to be the right makeup) when you quench red-hot iron. And if the overseer is curious about why some rods got tougher and others didn't, he might come up with some rough-and-ready tests for what "good" iron tips should look/taste like. Then everything depends on how secret he wants to be about it. "Gorri made really good iron, but his apprentice's stuff is mediocre."

Usually I put in a phrase like "what jumped out at me was", but several things did this time--mostly to my admiration. I liked that they tried to cut stone with stone; covering all the bases. But they said their bronze chisels "have been cast by". Bronze was hammer worked for maximum hardness, and the result is supposed to be about as hard as unhardened medium steel. One variety of bronze can be hardened to 95 HRb, which is comparable to some low end steels. I wonder if the test was quite fair--if the bronze was merely cast and not hardened.

And, btw, high carbon steel rusts faster than iron does. We're less likely to find steel artifacts, and might draw the wrong conclusions from the absence.

For the curious, Neil Burridge offered one of his bronze swords for destructive testing. It doesn't hold up to modern steel swords, but other experiments say it would have been a match for old iron swords.

Mummy faces

Egyptian reinterpretation? An Egyptologist with a revisionist book to hawk asserts that since the Egyptians had few mirrors, "they didn't know what they looked like" and therefore " “When people look at a face inside a mummy and say, ‘oh, they looked just like us’, it is just an illusion,”" Why? Because the mummies were being adjusted to be more acceptable to the divine.

Of course that was part of the reason for mummification, but the sine qua non was that the body actually survive, and I've seen nothing in mummies to suggest that the mummy faces were specially redone to look better. They put masks over the body, generally stylized. The dead wanted to "identify" as a god: I gather Price wants to indulge them in their long-dead illusions and have the rest of us join in that attempted deification, looking at the god-face rather than the human one. "no CT scans nor facial recognition imagery will appear in the exhibition" Or perhaps, as is customary, the reporter screwed the story up beyond recognition.

Amazonian cities

They were living on mounds in the flood plain in the Amazon basin--well, not always flooding. Lidar shows reservoirs, so maybe it wasn't always flooded. (or maybe the reservoirs were built late, during a drought?) In fact, if they grew corn, that can't handle above 2 weeks of flood, and then only at certain times in growth. Cassava isn't fond of flooding either.

They fortified two of their towns, and some points along the causeways. Maybe outsiders, or maybe they had a history of civil war? Look at the lidar image, and imagine where wooden structures might go. People don't usually live inside fortified areas much of the time--it's crowded and unsanitary. I'm guessing that there'd have been wooden houses not far from the causeways. The image is from the above ArsTechnica article:

The group in question seems to have started going sometime around 500AD, and abandoned things about 1400AD--pre-Columbus=pre-known-epidemics. Climate change, perhaps? "This'll only last a century or so"--but technology can vanish in a generation.

The Amazonian civilizations made "geoglyphs", which were supposedly for ceremonial uses. "The count is three and two, two men on, ... and he calls time."

This is from Nature: article "articles/s41467-018-03510-7"

Unfortunately thorough excavation and analysis will probably take decades, but it should be fun to see what we learn in the meantime. I assume there was some trade across the Andes, and it looks like feathers (The influence of Amazonia on state formation in the ancient Andes It is argued that Arawak expansion in the Amazonian lowlands, completed by c. AD 500, was a prerequisite development for stimulating the rise of Andean highland empires, which were heavily dependent upon imported prestige Amazonian feathers.) might have been an important item. I wonder if it was easier to trade with the Aztecs and their precursors.

Dolmens

I wasn't expecting 40% of the world's dolmens to be in Korea. They have several varieties, and theories about whether the notion was from southeast asia or northeast asia or home-grown.

The patterns seem simple enough that parallel invention seems plausible--however, note where dolmens aren't found in significant quantities.

Maybe there's sampling bias at work. Do sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas have menhirs?

The wikipedia list is not complete. It leaves out Korea, there are deer stones in Mongolia/Siberia, and others. However, it mentions Ethiopia, though that's close enough to the MidEast to have had a lot of influence from there. And there's a tribe in South America that erected some menhirs--clearly independently of anything in the Old World.

Of course there are plenty of examples of South American stonework--far more sophisticated than simple megaliths--but not as old.

My intuition was that kids building things out of rocks would be inspiration enough for adults to build their own: medium-sized first for keeping critters out of the cairn and then big for monuments. If you built earthworks first the assembly wouldn't be so bad--the headache would be finding and moving the appropriate stones. But making the big ones--the ones that last--takes a minimum amount of manpower. If dolmens are too ugly, or the religion doesn't honor stones in relevant way, or if the local culture is too small or too poor--no, you'd not build them. If you had tools for shaping stones to your liking, you'd not bother with anything that crude.

Finding none in such wide areas? I have to guess that my intuition was wrong: they spread with the "idea" of dolmens, and possibly even then only with information about technological tricks for making them. And there'd be a window of opportunity. Too early and you don't have the manpower, and too late and you'll have nicer ways to make monuments.

---

When you try to cross-check things, you find ever expanding temptations to rabbit-track. I ran across claims of ancient Indian stone structures in New England--some of which seem to be attested and others seem to be wishful thinking. There's an interesting site nearer to me that unfortunately has to have its location kept secret. And some things look extremely fake.

Rams

Many of the metal ends (rostrums) on the end of Roman and Carthaginian rams survived, and a previously unlocated naval battle is now known. One end of the rostrum was a hollow socket to fit on the end of the wooden prow. The front of it was split into several shovel-like spikes for poking holes into other ships, with gaps between to help snag the enemy's oars if you wound up skimming alongside instead of hitting squarely.

Strangely, the divers have found that the hollowed-out insides are often filled with small objects such as coins. This, he says, is the work of octopuses, who have turned the rostrums into temporary dens. They have a magpie-like tendency to pick up treasure – and fill their homes with trinkets. "They are inveterate collectors," he says. "They'll take anything they can get their hands – or tentacles – on."

Master of Divinity had a slightly different meaning...

Going out into the day:

O you soul, great majestic, behold, I have come that I may see you; I open the Netherworld that I may see my father Osiris and drive away darkness, for I am beloved of him.

I have come that I may see my father Osiris and that I may cut out the breath of Seth who has harmed my father Osiris. I have opened up every path that is in the sky and on earth, for I am the well-beloved son of my father Osiris. I am noble, I am spirit, I am equipped; O all you gods and all you spirits, prepare a path for me.

Another one:

I have dug up the sky, I have hacked up the horizon, I have traversed the earth to its furthest extent, I have taken possession of the spirits of the great ones, because I am one who equips a myriad with his magic. I eat with my mouth, I defecate with my hinder-parts, for I am a god, lord of the Netherworld, I have given up those things which were established in the past, I have planned appearance in glory.

Going in and out of the west:

To me belong all men, I have given everything to myself. I have gone in as a falcon, I have come out as a phoenix, the god who worships Ra. Prepare a path for me, that I may enter in peace into the beautiful West, for I belong to the Lake of Horus, I leash the hounds of Horus. Prepare a way for me, that I may go in and worship Osiris, the Lord of Life.

..........

These spells don't seem to have just been limited to the use of Pharoahs. Maybe at first, but over time it looks like anybody who could afford a spell papyrus could call himself Ra. (in a different spell) Though a god who has to step aside for a toilet break probably can't send down fire from heaven...

Relics of Empire

When an empire does what we and all our creations eventually do, how do you know it was there? What's left?

If they went in for big construction, maybe you'll find Lovecraftian haunted ruins (or think Xenophon and Nineveh if you're not into Lovecraft).

If the locals became numerous again in the years since the collapse, instead of ruins you'll find walls built with a variety of old temple stones, bakers rolling stones made of old tombstones, and other things that make archaeologists weep.

If they were literate you'll find inscriptions on stone, but little of the rest will be saved unless somebody finds it valuable enough to copy. In the West the church saved things, and in the East--well, Rome lasted longer there. (Antiquarians of the future will assert that "the Lion-Hearted" was an honorific for Nixon.)

If, like Rome, the empire created a reputation for stability and the rule of law and prosperity (never mind its multiple civil wars for now), it will leave a legacy in laws and ideals. For over a thousand years after Western Rome had fallen, kings still took Roman titles and claimed Roman dignities. OTOH, who knows of much besides the title of pharaoh? It's a good thing the Egyptians built pyramids.

The elite want luxuries and people have opportunity to specialize--if the empire lasts long enough I'd think they'd develop cuisines. Poor man's version of those filter down. (Our family version of konigsberger klopse is much simpler than the "proper versions".) It's not, or not always, "whatever we have goes in the pot." The rich might trade for imported spices, but the rest find local equivalents to vary the food and make it tasty. That's a good legacy, though probably not the type the original empire-builders intended.

Iron work in unexpected places

"Hunter-gatherers who lived more than 2,000 years ago near the top of the world appear to have run ironworking operations as advanced as those of farming societies far to the south." That points to the paper:

"Excavations in what’s now northeastern Sweden uncovered ancient furnaces and fire pits that hunter-gatherers used for metalworking." And some of it fairly sophisticated too. I guess they had enough forests to make charcoal, and some source of ore. If you have that, what you need is enough people to help with making charcoal and building some furnaces. Mining and crushing the ore isn't quite trivial either. There's a bit of investment in infrastructure, and finding the right tools and organization for the work. I'm guessing the actual iron-working spots were pretty much fixed, and maybe only used part of the year.

Having your own iron source could be handy enough that you'd spend some effort trying to entice at least a smith to come live with you. I read that AmerIndians were annoyed at having to rely on other people for all their iron tools--the situation might be roughly parallel. I'm told there were bounties paid for smiths to settle in small towns in the colonies, but there was already a market in them, and the culture was the same--and sedentary enough to make such a move natural and convenient.

But a move to a more migratory culture would be a much more jarring transition. There'd be a smaller market for the smithing skill, though a good one for newly smelted iron. And what in that culture would seem to be an enticement? Getting away from a feud? Women? A friend? I'm guessing that the southern and northern tribes were nearly as different as Indians and colonists here.

Once you've adopted some iron workers, you're over the hump, and the rest of your tribe and allied tribes should get the technology eventually. If they have the natural resources.

UPDATE: wrt iron among the Indians this describes some of it. The Eskimos had iron, some from meteorites, some possibly from trade with Greenland, long before Columbus.