5 ms·

Sometimes thought it is a bummer living in the states, less of an opportunity to go find some 1000+ year old relics knowing full well the likelihood of that hap

Sometimes thought it is a bummer living in the states, less of an opportunity to go find some 1000+ year old relics knowing full well the likelihood of that happening is slim even if I lived in another country with bronze/iron age.

saetaes 5y ago
People lived in the US 1000+ years ago, and I feel pretty confident that if you know where to look, relics can still be found.
- voz_ 5y ago
  Yes, but they were not nearly advanced enough for metallurgy and the like. Their artifacts, while no less important, fade away far quicker.
  - AlotOfReading 5y ago
    The oldest copper artifacts we have are from the old copper complex around Lake Superior, and more recent metalworking traditions were present throughout much of the Americas.
    - voz_ 5y ago
      Perhaps you are not deeply familiar with this realm, but trivial (native) copper working is not generally considered metallurgy. For an amateur but no less correct source, wikipedia provides a good quip for us: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_in_pre-Columbian_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_in_pre-Columbian_Am... Archaeological evidence has not revealed metal smelting or alloying of metals by pre-Columbian native peoples north of the Rio Grande; however, they did use native copper extensively.[32] Which then further cites: George Rapp Jr, Guy Gibbon & Kenneth Ames (1998). Archaeology of Prehistoric Native America: an Encyclopedia. New York: Taylor & Francis. p. 26. I do not own this book, so I apologize I cannot verify the citation.
      - wincy 5y ago
        I didn’t realize how easy native copper smelting was until I watched some of those primitive YouTube channels where they make a water filtration system and smelt some copper using a hand made smelter. Linked below if anyone is interested. https://youtube.com/watch?v=f0BjU20kU5E https://youtube.com/watch?v=f0BjU20kU5E
        ummonk 5y ago
        It's not exactly easy - requires good quality coal, and fine tuning to get the right airflow to coal ratio to create a sufficiently hot furnace without becoming oxidizing. Those guys describe having to try multiple times before working out a successful process to produce copper, documenting a couple of their experiments in videos. They've nicely fully documented their final configuration in this video - some high quality experimental archeology work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYaJuab5riE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYaJuab5riE Keep in mind that you have to be wary of poisonous fumes - hopefully the elements giving their copper alloy a brassy appearance don't include lead, or worse, arsenic.
      - AlotOfReading 5y ago
        Native copper working is considered metallurgy in archaeology. If you disagree, feel free to take it up with the archaeometallurgists. Moreover, purification from ores was done. The so-called copper bells of the southwest were mainly produced from ores rather than native copper and were often alloyed with arsenic or silver to modify the color. The main center of production was paquimé (~180mi west of the Rio Grande), but the cultural area extends well over the border into AZ, NM, and CO.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    Stone artifacts last longer than metal ones.
  - ummonk 5y ago
    It’s the other way around - stone lasts, while advanced metallurgy (iron) has a tendency to rust away.
    - voz_ 5y ago
      My understanding that advanced stone, shaped with metal, lasts. However, simple stone tools (think axes, hammers, flint arrowheads etc) tend to get easily lost. This is made furthermore difficult by the difficulty (impossibility?) of distinguishing them on tools like metal detectors
      - AlotOfReading 5y ago
        No, they're quite easy to find if you know what you're looking for and you look in the right places. Lithics in the ancient world were a bit like plastics today: ubiquitous and highly disposable. For particular lithics industries/tools and certain situations you might get some amount of reworking, but ultimately people were producing new tools very frequently. That means that any area in which you might find them on the surface will usually have some and a long term production site will have overwhelming artifact density. They can occasionally look like normal rocks, but once you train your eye the worked faces become visually distinct.
- handrous 5y ago
  I think most folks would have more fun with a metal detector and a map of Civil and Revolutionary War military camps and battlegrounds, or even just poking around ghost towns or old farmhouses, than looking for pre-Columbian artifacts, up here north of the Rio. It's largely disappointing and if you actually manage to sort-of prove that the broken barely-recognizable spear point you found came from some named group of people circa 800 CE, you'll inevitably find that we know almost nothing about them and that what we do know makes them sound exactly like every other group around that time, since we just don't know much about any of them besides trite generalities.
sushsjsuauahab 5y ago
There are likey a lot of dinosaurs still left to be found in the central plains :)
hellbannedguy 5y ago
I always felt there were millions of buried gold in certain parts of America. Buried money, and gold. Back in the day before banks we buried, or hid our valuables. There must be stashes of loot buried in people's back yard? I bought a metal detector years ago, and got bored very quick. I found a quarter, and a pot metal medallion. Here's a good treasure story. I knew a lady years ago who went through a rough divorce. Her husband made his wad in the 80's as a drug dealer. When they were fat, and happy, they would whoop it up. This one night they went to the Fairmont Hotel for dinner. She drove home because he was to inebriated. They lived out at the beach. In a drunken stupor, along with other substances running through his body, he decided to hide his "house money". He walked out of the house with his pipe filled with $800,000. He woke up the next day not remembering anything. She told him what he did. He rushed out to the back yard, and nothing was disturbed on the ground. He frantically ran around the neighborhood looking for his pipe of money. He went to the beach to no avail. They were both disappointed. But it was only part of their money. Years later they got a divorce. She told me this story many times. I was excited because I was planning on going to the new owners of the house, and offer free landscaping. It was a long shot, but I love capers. The big problem was his money bank pipe was pvc, but it was still on my mind. A few years later, my divorced friend saw the new owners of the beach house in Safeway, and told them the story. I doubt they found any money, but I will always remember the lost beach/drug money. (Both passed away, so I feel this treasure story can be told.)
s1artibartfast 5y ago
There are many places you can find 10k old relics in the USA. Arrow and Spear heads are common, as well as petroglyphs.
ummonk 5y ago
Has the genocide of Native Americans become so complete that we forget about their existence mere days after Thanksgiving?
- MaxHoppersGhost 5y ago
  Population density of Native Americans was low and their wares were not particularly durable. Good luck finding something.
  - ummonk 5y ago
    Stone and ceramic are very durable (the latter tends to break into potsherds, but doesn't rust away as iron does). And population density doesn't need to be particularly high to be able to locate settlements and dig up artifacts.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    This is simply not true. There are many places where you can go where the impacti of the Native Americans is still very obvious. There are places where you can find hundreds of religious carvings, arrowheads, obsidian artifacts, ect.
ransom1538 5y ago
BUT!! The US has great magnet fishing - tons of guns thrown over bridges. (Be careful though - WWII guys threw contraband over these bridges - grenades etc). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ9D1hcwq-8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ9D1hcwq-8
freeflight 5y ago
I would reckon the chances are higher to still find something in the states. The "old world" had quite a head-start in digging up stuff and is also much more densely populated, so more people have been digging up old stuff for longer.

saetaes 5y ago

People lived in the US 1000+ years ago, and I feel pretty confident that if you know where to look, relics can still be found.

voz_ 5y ago
Yes, but they were not nearly advanced enough for metallurgy and the like. Their artifacts, while no less important, fade away far quicker.
- AlotOfReading 5y ago
  The oldest copper artifacts we have are from the old copper complex around Lake Superior, and more recent metalworking traditions were present throughout much of the Americas.
  - voz_ 5y ago
    Perhaps you are not deeply familiar with this realm, but trivial (native) copper working is not generally considered metallurgy. For an amateur but no less correct source, wikipedia provides a good quip for us: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_in_pre-Columbian_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_in_pre-Columbian_Am... Archaeological evidence has not revealed metal smelting or alloying of metals by pre-Columbian native peoples north of the Rio Grande; however, they did use native copper extensively.[32] Which then further cites: George Rapp Jr, Guy Gibbon & Kenneth Ames (1998). Archaeology of Prehistoric Native America: an Encyclopedia. New York: Taylor & Francis. p. 26. I do not own this book, so I apologize I cannot verify the citation.
    - wincy 5y ago
      I didn’t realize how easy native copper smelting was until I watched some of those primitive YouTube channels where they make a water filtration system and smelt some copper using a hand made smelter. Linked below if anyone is interested. https://youtube.com/watch?v=f0BjU20kU5E https://youtube.com/watch?v=f0BjU20kU5E
      - ummonk 5y ago
        It's not exactly easy - requires good quality coal, and fine tuning to get the right airflow to coal ratio to create a sufficiently hot furnace without becoming oxidizing. Those guys describe having to try multiple times before working out a successful process to produce copper, documenting a couple of their experiments in videos. They've nicely fully documented their final configuration in this video - some high quality experimental archeology work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYaJuab5riE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYaJuab5riE Keep in mind that you have to be wary of poisonous fumes - hopefully the elements giving their copper alloy a brassy appearance don't include lead, or worse, arsenic.
    - AlotOfReading 5y ago
      Native copper working is considered metallurgy in archaeology. If you disagree, feel free to take it up with the archaeometallurgists. Moreover, purification from ores was done. The so-called copper bells of the southwest were mainly produced from ores rather than native copper and were often alloyed with arsenic or silver to modify the color. The main center of production was paquimé (~180mi west of the Rio Grande), but the cultural area extends well over the border into AZ, NM, and CO.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  Stone artifacts last longer than metal ones.
- ummonk 5y ago
  It’s the other way around - stone lasts, while advanced metallurgy (iron) has a tendency to rust away.
  - voz_ 5y ago
    My understanding that advanced stone, shaped with metal, lasts. However, simple stone tools (think axes, hammers, flint arrowheads etc) tend to get easily lost. This is made furthermore difficult by the difficulty (impossibility?) of distinguishing them on tools like metal detectors
    - AlotOfReading 5y ago
      No, they're quite easy to find if you know what you're looking for and you look in the right places. Lithics in the ancient world were a bit like plastics today: ubiquitous and highly disposable. For particular lithics industries/tools and certain situations you might get some amount of reworking, but ultimately people were producing new tools very frequently. That means that any area in which you might find them on the surface will usually have some and a long term production site will have overwhelming artifact density. They can occasionally look like normal rocks, but once you train your eye the worked faces become visually distinct.
handrous 5y ago
I think most folks would have more fun with a metal detector and a map of Civil and Revolutionary War military camps and battlegrounds, or even just poking around ghost towns or old farmhouses, than looking for pre-Columbian artifacts, up here north of the Rio. It's largely disappointing and if you actually manage to sort-of prove that the broken barely-recognizable spear point you found came from some named group of people circa 800 CE, you'll inevitably find that we know almost nothing about them and that what we do know makes them sound exactly like every other group around that time, since we just don't know much about any of them besides trite generalities.

sushsjsuauahab 5y ago

There are likey a lot of dinosaurs still left to be found in the central plains :)

hellbannedguy 5y ago

I always felt there were millions of buried gold in certain parts of America. Buried money, and gold. Back in the day before banks we buried, or hid our valuables. There must be stashes of loot buried in people's back yard? I bought a metal detector years ago, and got bored very quick. I found a quarter, and a pot metal medallion. Here's a good treasure story. I knew a lady years ago who went through a rough divorce. Her husband made his wad in the 80's as a drug dealer. When they were fat, and happy, they would whoop it up. This one night they went to the Fairmont Hotel for dinner. She drove home because he was to inebriated. They lived out at the beach. In a drunken stupor, along with other substances running through his body, he decided to hide his "house money". He walked out of the house with his pipe filled with $800,000. He woke up the next day not remembering anything. She told him what he did. He rushed out to the back yard, and nothing was disturbed on the ground. He frantically ran around the neighborhood looking for his pipe of money. He went to the beach to no avail. They were both disappointed. But it was only part of their money. Years later they got a divorce. She told me this story many times. I was excited because I was planning on going to the new owners of the house, and offer free landscaping. It was a long shot, but I love capers. The big problem was his money bank pipe was pvc, but it was still on my mind. A few years later, my divorced friend saw the new owners of the beach house in Safeway, and told them the story. I doubt they found any money, but I will always remember the lost beach/drug money. (Both passed away, so I feel this treasure story can be told.)

s1artibartfast 5y ago

There are many places you can find 10k old relics in the USA. Arrow and Spear heads are common, as well as petroglyphs.

ummonk 5y ago

Has the genocide of Native Americans become so complete that we forget about their existence mere days after Thanksgiving?

MaxHoppersGhost 5y ago
Population density of Native Americans was low and their wares were not particularly durable. Good luck finding something.
- ummonk 5y ago
  Stone and ceramic are very durable (the latter tends to break into potsherds, but doesn't rust away as iron does). And population density doesn't need to be particularly high to be able to locate settlements and dig up artifacts.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  This is simply not true. There are many places where you can go where the impacti of the Native Americans is still very obvious. There are places where you can find hundreds of religious carvings, arrowheads, obsidian artifacts, ect.

ransom1538 5y ago

BUT!! The US has great magnet fishing - tons of guns thrown over bridges. (Be careful though - WWII guys threw contraband over these bridges - grenades etc). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ9D1hcwq-8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ9D1hcwq-8

freeflight 5y ago

I would reckon the chances are higher to still find something in the states. The "old world" had quite a head-start in digging up stuff and is also much more densely populated, so more people have been digging up old stuff for longer.