Early Pre-Germanic heavy plough and Bronze Age?
- Thread starter DUWANG
- Start date
Based on this map, the Tewtā́mis (which I will use now for this civilization, it's basically just the German "Deutschen" but in very bad Pre-Germanic) shouldn't have a problem with Copper, also not really with Tin if trade can be arranged, I also saw a map that showed Denmark itself having Copper resources. But could the possibility of not getting tin start a early Iron Age?
So if we give the "Tewtā́mis" iron, like Sub-Sahara Africa did, then that would make the problems with bronze away. Any idea on what plants besides Typha they could grow? What about animals, could the domesticate animals that were only domesticated later or around other places? Any Idea where they could expand? I want to say along the Rhine, but during these times it's mostly muddy swamps and land that get's flooded like what, every half a decade?
The big problem with iron is its really hard to make useful, and even to mine. The necessary metallurgical techniques were developed of centuries of working with other metals, chiefly bronze, so getting it much earlier is hard. Unlike most of the other metals of antiquity, you need to get it HOT for iron to melt, tin you can melt over a simple fire (which was a common way to mine it), and copper could be melted in just a pottery kiln to separate the ore from everything else. After that, both copper and tin are pretty pure, their low melting points allow a pretty simple separation. They are also easy to blend together in an alloy (bronze, brass, etc.). Iron is none of those, it has a very high melting point which requires specialized equipment such as bellows to achieve, you have to get the amount of carbon in a carbon-steel alloy within a certain range to be useful or you might just end up with brittle garbage, and mining it requires you to actually mine it, unlike tin or lead. To date only there is only one area of the world that may have jumped straight to ferrous metallurgy (the Nok), and even then we're not sure if they developed it themselves or if it came from the Mediterranean, much less how they made the jump if they did do it themselves. Ultimately, a jump to early iron is going to be very hard to do, the road of least resistance definitely goes through Bronze. Tin was a widely traded good, so it isn't a limit to transitioning to bronze tools. It may even give an indication for a way the pre-germanics might expand, conquering of tin mining areas was fairly common practice in antiquity to secure a source of the metal.
Last edited:
Eh, more like 30% bigger. Domestication often brings with it a size decrease, and given that Cattle and Zebu are ultimately just domestic Aurochs, another Aurochs domestication event isn't creating something all that different from those.
So a good solution for a potential need of tin would be something like OTL migration till the contact with the Hallstatt Celts but with a more Bohemian centric way? invading Cornwall doesn't seem like a good option, so Bohemia would be the only chance for the Tewtā́mis to get their own tin (which would also give them more living area and farm land)
Tin should be available in the Erz mountain, so definitely accessible through the Elbe:
ec.europa.eu
Success stories
ec.europa.eu
Going up the Elbe and the Oder to Bohemia is definitely possible, but a local tin source isn't essential to a bronze age culture. Warfare can secure it certainly, but so can trade. If you go the trade route, I think an earlier start to the Amber road will do it, that was one of the main routes for Bronze expansion in Northern Europe OTL, so it should do the trick here too.
Reindeer can live and thrive in Denmark on heathland, it would likely also do well in German heathland. But honestly it’s less productive than having sheep or cattle on the same land, and until the development of the heavy plough heathland were the main agricultural land, The sandy soil is poor and nearly useless, but it’s possible to farm with an ard plough on such soil, while it’s almost impossible to use the same plough on the richer soil heavy in humus and clay.
Moose is better choice than reindeer and they we’re widespread in Denmark and Northern Germany at the time, the problem is that they function very well with traditional agriculture. We would likely have to introduce wild rice from northern China to get a crop which function well in the same environment as moose.
In general I think the problem is that I have a hard time imagine a heavy plough without rather highly developed iron or steel production. The Africans seems to found a short cut to blast furnaces (using material from termite mounds), but I have a hard time seeing the same short cut being developed in Europe.
I think the best way to improve agricultural output is improvement in agroforestry. But I don’t really think that any tree or bus native to the region which have a similar output per acre to cereal crops, at least none which is easy to keep outside the season.
I think the best way to improve agricultural output is improvement in agroforestry. But I don’t really think that any tree or bus native to the region which have a similar output per acre to cereal crops, at least none which is easy to keep outside the season.
By what metrics? Do you have specific figures and do you know if complete or longer domestication can affect those figures?
If we assume that they use moose only in marginal lands and the people domesticating try to use and select their already existing food sources for productivity, wouldn't that at least allow for some sporadic but continuous presence of domesticated moose?
To be honest any stronger exploitation of the land is going to help, if through reindeer and moose domestication we have a continuous presence of Germanic "herders"(if you can call it that) in Northern Fennoscandia for centuries, we could see the a more interconnected Fennoscandia with stronger trade routes and contacts going into the East, which would probably foster earlier contacts with Steppe nomads and Black sea or even Caspian traders.
Last edited:
By the fact that reindeer meat and milk is very low in calories for meat, and sheep also keep producing wool. Also I don’t think further domestication is the answer. Reindeers are perfect for where they’re supposed to live, they’re just the inferior option in southern Scandinavia and north Germany.
The problem is that there’s not a lot of that kind of marginal land in Denmark, Danish swamps and wetlands are better of drained and made into agricultural lands. We pretty much have to go back to the Danish Fisher Stone Age (6400/5400-4000 BC) for the moose to be a beneficial domesticate. Of course that would pretty much demand that Denmark developed it own agricultural packet (which would likely build on acorn, hazelnut, beets and cabbage, with moose and pigs as the main domesticated animals).
The problem is that Denmark, Southern Scandinavia and North Germany doesn’t really lend itself to herders, but what it lend itself to is boat transport. Honestly best case would really be if we could see iron being accidental developed independent in the region. The problems for the region was that it was poor in copper and tin, it was dependent on trade routes, and as it was relative poor it could little afford bronze. Which stayed a luxury goods. it had on the other hand easy access to pig iron. So if we see a earlier introduction of iron, it would make it easier to build boats. The benefit of the introduction of iron, would also be that it wouldn’t really spread, early iron working was inferior to bronze. So you could see a Baltic culture use iron without it having any big effect outside the region.
I believe you misunderstood me, in my last reply I was more thinking about Northern and Eastenr Fennoscandia rather than Denmark or Southern Germany. If we assume a domestication occuring in south-central Sweden/Norway wouldn't we see the expansion of herders to Northern Scandinavia, Finland, Karelia and the Kola Peninsula? I believe this wouldn't have a negative effect long term, maybe not civilization defining for the core of the Nordic Bronze Age but it would provide more access to northern mines earlier, make southern Scandinavia less of a last frontier but more of a central place and like I said make the East more accessible, encouraging earlier river trade in Russia and the Baltic.
About iron, I imagine it would be easier to envision a faster spread from Anatolia than independent development, but I'm not sure how one would go about doing that.
Honestly when I look into it, it’s not impossible that we could see a independent development of iron working, Scandinavia seems to have adopted copper working around 5500 years only to give it shortly after again (likely thanks to the lack of copper ore around Denmark) and then having 1500 years more of Stone Age. The lack of copper ore in West Subsaharan Africa may have resulted in a independent development of iron working after the idea of copper working was introduced to the region. A similar development could be seen around the Baltic.
Yeah if iron either spread or was developed independently in West Africa it can definitely happen in NW and Central Europe, not even necessarily Scandinavia, earlier than OTL, especially places that stubbornly didn't take iron for centuries like OTL Scandinavia, if we add to that some key agricultural technology spreading or developing north(afterall the "backwards" Slavs OTL seemed to have used heavy ploughs quite well) it could mean that density could be higher and the region could develop larger native industries and commerce, which could create a parallel to what happened OTL in Central Europe with Celts and La Tene.
The implication of early iron in Europe would also be important for the Steppe, maybe no nomadic Scythian takeover(or not as drastic) and continuous development of whatever Satem speaking population was there, probably still close to Iranians, likely it would also avert the Uralic expansion westward, considering it happened also because Uralic people developed good metallurgy and the regions they settled were slow in adopting iron and I believe were stagnating(Baltics and Fenno-Scandia).
If iron gets to Italy from the north earlier it could also mean it would be more proactive during the maritime expansions, maybe we would have Italian colonization westwards and southwards instead of only Greek or Phoenician(heck maybe even replacing them in some places at this point).
In way Europe would resemble more India linguistically, with a more smoother transition between linguistic groups, given that we wouldn't have the sharp breaks caused by the Urnfield and later Celtic Halstatt-La Tene expansion, Scythian takeover and then Greek-Roman takeover.
On the other hand you could have the sharp break be caused by a divided between the Central European world and the Mediterranean world anyway if alt-Italy becomes a stronger colonizing force, a mix between OTL Rome and Magna Graecia. Central Europe could still see the expansion or homogeneization of dialects and ethnicities, creating an alt-Celtic, but if we presume northern Europe is stronger demographically and adopts iron around the same time(or even earlier if one desires) instead of having La Tene and Jastorf acting as core and periphery we would have 2 competing and largely equal systems(insofar as 2 geographically distinct regions, one with worse climate, can be), though it might as well be it would be more multi-polar than that or that the geography would be totally different, in of itself I don't see a reason why the La Tene and Hallstatt system had to control the areas they did outside OTL patterns stemming from Urnfield(butterflied away), Scythian-Cimmerians(also likely butterflied away or made less important) and Greek colonialism(changed)
Optical_Illusion
Banned
Hmm - re heavy plough, paper here aims to exploit difference in cultivation on different soils to estimate impact - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2362894
They attribute about 10% of High Medieval increase in population density to heavy plough.
That's not nothing but I don't if it's that large on its own.
It might matter more if it does something like knit together unusable areas or something like this?
What actually does lead to more density and urbanisation in the north seems a bit of an open question still, to me. A change in culture (Roman influences, Christianity?), infrastructure and trade (Roman roads?), material technology (generally better crops, animals, tools?). There are said to be some incipient early urbanisations in the north in early-mid first millennium BCE - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10814-017-9107-1
One thing I do think is that if you had more sustainable population in the north, you might avoid mass migrations of Celts to the south, and this might help preserve more linguistic diversity in the south. Avoid Celtic migrations (provided they're what we thought) you might get a possibly more Etruscan Italy and a more Iberian Spain and the like.
They attribute about 10% of High Medieval increase in population density to heavy plough.
That's not nothing but I don't if it's that large on its own.
It might matter more if it does something like knit together unusable areas or something like this?
What actually does lead to more density and urbanisation in the north seems a bit of an open question still, to me. A change in culture (Roman influences, Christianity?), infrastructure and trade (Roman roads?), material technology (generally better crops, animals, tools?). There are said to be some incipient early urbanisations in the north in early-mid first millennium BCE - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10814-017-9107-1
One thing I do think is that if you had more sustainable population in the north, you might avoid mass migrations of Celts to the south, and this might help preserve more linguistic diversity in the south. Avoid Celtic migrations (provided they're what we thought) you might get a possibly more Etruscan Italy and a more Iberian Spain and the like.
I don't see how the 2 are connected. Higher growth might imply more people migrating actually.
Optical_Illusion
Banned
The argument would be that migrations were prompted by more stable climates / opportunities being disproportionately in the south, and so crises / opportunity in the north driving southwards. You actually might see more migration but more two-way, alternatively, I guess.