Copper Casting In Ancient America

Yuri,

So you agree that, if evidence of casting copper is found in the Great Lakes area, it was done by Indians?

Tom McDonald

Reply to
Tom McDonald
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Yes.

I've always opposed diffusionism, and my personal inclination is usually towards independent invention.

Yuri.

Yuri Kuchinsky in Toronto -=O=-

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It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought -=O=- John K. Galbraith

Reply to
Yuri Kuchinsky

That's right, Seppo.

Mr. McDonald is clearly not interested in any evidence that would indicate that the Native Americans were sophisticated enough to cast copper. He's shown this over and over again.

Well, let him go on with his denialism... Every post of his just serves as a further indictment of the American archaeological establishment in all its bigoted glory. And the same can be said about Dr. Tom Kavanagh.

Regards,

Yuri.

Yuri Kuchinsky in Toronto -=O=-

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If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people?

Reply to
Yuri Kuchinsky

Tom, he quoted correctly. Not only as Mallery himself quoted it but also as Proc.Wisconsin State Historical Society, VOl 7(1876) page 101 and same goes for the rest of Mallery's quoted source. They are also correct quoted.

Good Night.

Reply to
Inger E Johansson

Yuri,

I've asked you a couple of questions today about your ideas. Care to discuss them with me?

Tom McDonald

Reply to
Tom McDonald

Inger,

Eric has made the point that relevant documentation for Mallery's arguments has gone missing. I'm trying to discuss this with him. The question isn't what we have now to quote from, but what might be either lost or misplaced that would help us analyze the issue.

My question to you was whether you were going to back up your suggestion of possible GL copper in Iceland. Will you?

Tom McDonald

Reply to
Tom McDonald

I see it takes EDITING OUT (unacknowledged at that) the discussion about the evidence for TK to make that claim!! Not what you call "honest" at all! Only NO amount of denial of the existence if it will make it go away. It takes far, far more than that.

Reply to
Seppo Renfors

what the hell do you think is?

tk

Reply to
t(nospam)kavanagh

I can't say for certain. However, on his death Mallery left his papers to the Smithsonian so I though that was the best place to start looking for private reports etc. Its not that I couldn't locate thme. Its that the Smithsonian had passed them on to somebody else. From memory someone on the staff of the 'somebody else' several times said they would get back to me when they found them but I continue to hear nothing. I've given up asking.

Eric Stevens

Reply to
Eric Stevens

Pardon a mere engineer for interjecting, but from my reading of her polemic, she didn't answer either of those questions. Sure, she pooh- poohed a couple of strawmen with mudslinging, but she gave no hard numbers of her own.

"When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it. But when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind." -Lord Kelvin, Popular Lectures and Addresses,

1889

It should be rather straight forward for a field geologist or mining engineer with the requisite experience in copper mining to give a good order of magnitude estimate of the amount of copper originally present and since removed from the sites mentioned elsewhere in this thread. That is their business after all (BTW it is not generally a metallurgist's business to know such things).

BTW, the figures Martin tried to pooh-pooh are a small fraction of the amount modern miners have extracted. Considering that the original miners were working the pristine lode, and not the picked over remains that modern miners found, and that they worked it over a period of thousands of years, 1.5 billion pounds is not an impossible amount.

The evidence shows that copper was mined in ancient times, and that the mining activities were extensive. So, the more interesting question to me, assuming a reasonable number for the amount extracted, is where did all that copper go? The amount represented by local artifacts is woefully inadequate to explain even the most pessimistic estimate of the amount which must have been mined.

This "missing copper" almost demands a hypothesis of systematic trade beyond the region. Whether or not trade extended beyond the Americas, I'm unable to even form an opinion at this point. I wouldn't rule it out, however. Everything I've read recently seems to say that there was substantially more contact between the Old World and the New before Columbus than I was taught in school a half century ago.

On the original topic of cast copper which brought this thread over into the metalworking group, the presence of porosity, as demonstrated by X-rays, in native copper artifacts dated from the era is pretty conclusive evidence of casting. I'd go so far as to say it is a virtual smoking gun.

It takes a fair degree of sophistication to *avoid* porosity in "backyard" grade copper castings, and there are few other processes (primarily electric arc welding, which I think we can safely rule out) which could produce it in native copper.

Gary

Reply to
Gary Coffman

Hear, hear! And there, there. Please rescue us from Ph.D. archaelogists about this subject, which every casting engineer knows from first-hand and long-tested experience. d8-)

If you have bubbles or porosity in copper castings, they show up in X-rays. If you have clusters of bubbles, you have virtually certain evidence of melting at atmospheric pressure in air -- in other words, on the earth's surface, not underground, at the time of the metal's formation or agglomeration. And if you can start a charcoal grill without using kerosene to get it lit, you probably can melt copper, given a little wind or good lungs...

Ed Huntress

Reply to
Ed Huntress

Note that he does not actually answer the question. He has long claimed to favour independent invention, and at the same time made many posts suggesting that what others consider indigenous developments were brought to the Americas from abroad.

Doug

Reply to
Doug Weller

"Eric Stevens" skrev i meddelandet news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Most of the "material" is kept in Keeler's depositits.

Inger E

Reply to
Inger E Johansson

[..]

This is actually not relevant Inger, and it is another irrelevant point Doug Weller has grasped and run with to try to side track the issue. Note it is about BLAST furnaces and limited to Ohio - and much older than that existed already anyway:

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As for your arguments on logic - if in "B" something was found, doesn't necessarily mean "A" would have the same thing. There are far too many variables to consider than was possible in that simple example of yours. However, if the evidence of casting existed in your "A" or "B" site is immaterial, the pertinent point being - it exists - and that is all that is needed. Granted, logically other artefacts are highly likely to also exist - only where is another story.

[..]
Reply to
Seppo Renfors

[..]

...and the article you pointed to is STILL bogus - no amount of wall paper owned by anybody will alter that.

Oh how limited certain people are that they need to restrict their knowledge to a single state! Hop across to Wisconsin and they know nothing anymore, right?

Not if one is to judge by that crap you have saved on your web site and keep pointing to (I'm sure she rather you had not saved it, it has to be an embarrassment to her)

Reply to
Seppo Renfors

Oh come on Tom, that garbage your Puppet Master keeps pointing to is just that - garbage. I mean, I pointed to a few (out of a whole stack) serious errors, that is quite APPALLING for anyone claiming some knowledge on the subject to make.

YOU haven't even dared to address those "points", you merely dance to the string pulling by your master. Do you even realise how obvious that is?

[..]
Reply to
Seppo Renfors

Yes, well there are a number of people who likes to "debunk" the "myth" of the holocaust too. They too set up web pages for that purpose....

You putting BOGUS material up on your web site, doesn't make it any LESS bogus.

Judging by your preferred article, almost anybody would. Bullshit mudslinging isn't exactly an ACADEMIC - it is POLITICS at best, but then Douggie IS into politics with his statements most of the time.

Here is more of the old, "Bugger the content look at the LABEL" - bogus claims, are bogus claims, irrespective of who makes them. From the embarrassing article of hers you keep pointing to is so off the wall you been to know nothing at all about archaeology, metallurgy or mining to know what a load of crock that article is!

Oh..... and a person's NAME - eg "Martin" is "evidence", hmmm? That is all Douggie has - nothing else! In any event what we see is raw DENIAL

- nothing else from Douggie. It is his POLITICS.

That language would have to be "English" - he fails to understand the subject line. How is it possible to demand "evidence" against something that hasn't established a bloody thing? EG Susan R. Martin's off topic article mudslinging about quantity of copper ore/nuggets mined?

So lets see now, did she mention "cast" or "mould"? NO she doesn't. Interestingly what se DOES state is "SMELTED" in a part she refers to as "fact" (though no date is mentioned nor place)!! So put that in your pipe and smoke it! Smelting is as close as you need to get to "cast", as whatever the end product is called, it is in fact CAST!

How is it that a so called "expert" uses crappy illogical terms like, "geological copper", where the "geological" should be in relation to copper be referring to "deposit/resources/ore" or the like. Or even "native copper" - when the INTENT is to refer to "copper nuggets" used by native people. I wouldn't even call her language "academic" or "scholarly" in that embarrassing article (for hers)!

Ahhhh... so insults is "evidence" of the writings you pointed to as being from a "leading expert" - when a 10 year old kid could shred it with logic! In fact I did far more than "insult", I backed up my statement - and that statement was that the article is plain bogus - and I have already proven that.

Uhu... and that is indeed what Douggie has been doing. He names ME in his insults - only HE insults people's intelligence by pointing to:

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...and arguing it is "proof" that no casting of copper was done by native people before Columbus! After all THAT was the subject at hand. What Weller is doing is derailing the discussion again - not "contributing" to it.

OK, so Doug "charlatan" Weller it is..... no skin of MY nose .....

*shrug*

I would still like Doug to quote the section out of that article that in HIS "charlatan" mind proves "no casting of copper occurred in North America before the arrival of Columbus" - that is what he set out to prove after all.

Yuri wrote in the original message:

"Copper Casting In Ancient America?"

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"To my knowledge, Caley never reversed his positive evaluation of Mallery's evidence of copper melting and casting by North America's pre-Columbian Indians. It is really strange that no American archaeo-metallurgists have seen fit to follow up on this."

Please also note subject line!!

Reply to
Seppo Renfors

What I see above is far from honest. Nobody has suggested the "original material from the experts he cites" is missing - HIS OWN material (Mallery's) is missing - which isn't the same thing at all. See the text immediately below.

People who do work like that do NOT give away more than a copy of their findings - they keep the original and their own notes etc. So if these researchers and their findings are cited in the book, then they should be able to be found - unless they too ended have up in some Smithsonian black hole (for political reasons?).

No you wouldn't - the minute it doesn't suit the political agendas it is rejected - that IS the track record after all. I see it time and time again - never any genuine reason if one is given at all, even less a scientific reason for a rejection. Why would anything change? Wolter has done the work re- KRS - that too doesn't fit the politics, consequently the finding is rejected. Yes there is indeed a track record of it.

Reply to
Seppo Renfors

Ahhh... the Puppet Master yanked at the strings again :-)

Reply to
Seppo Renfors

Why do you make them then? I was *trying* to repeatedly attack *Inger*, I haven't *started* on you yet, you don't make enough sense to argue with.

And it would be appropriate for you to receive what you produce.

Reply to
Martyn Harrison

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