how to make great lake region bronze age civilization before the Viking visit to Vinland in 1000 AD

As opposed to "broze age" could they hop over Bronze to Iron? Half the reason the bronze age collapsed was that the supply lines for tin fell apart, and Iron while not as strong as bronze, only needed the one component. My knowledge of antiquity is summed up by my high school class so I'm probably wrong
The problem with skipping straight to iron is that it melts at about 1500 degrees Celsius. Copper is about 1100 and tin is about 250. You need to get to a point where it's realistic to be able to smelt iron.

Once you can do that, you can dig nickel out of the Sudbury basin and melt it too to give yourself nickel silver.
 

Deleted member 97083

The problem with skipping straight to iron is that it melts at about 1500 degrees Celsius. Copper is about 1100 and tin is about 250. You need to get to a point where it's realistic to be able to smelt iron.

Once you can do that, you can dig nickel out of the Sudbury basin and melt it too to give yourself nickel silver.
Melting iron isn't necessary. Only smelting it is, so that it can be worked and shaped. In fact, many Bronze Age furnaces were actually hot enough to smelt iron at 1100-1150 degrees Celsius. However, it took a long time for blacksmiths to become skilled enough, and trade links developed enough, to make working with iron cost-effective compared to bronze.
 
Melting iron isn't necessary. Only smelting it is, so that it can be worked and shaped. In fact, many Bronze Age furnaces were actually hot enough to smelt iron at 1100-1150 degrees Celsius. However, it took a long time for blacksmiths to become skilled enough, and trade links developed enough, to make working with iron cost-effective compared to bronze.
I did say smelt. You still need more heat to do that and more skill to do it well.

I don't think you could just jump straight from zero to iron working, that is.
 
I did say smelt. You still need more heat to do that and more skill to do it well.

I don't think you could just jump straight from zero to iron working, that is.

While the temperatures needed to work with both iron and bronze might not differ that much I think the problem lies rather with the availability of each. Copper can be found native and Tin has a rather low melting temperature, so it can be produced from its respective ore more easily (simple wood-fueled fires), but to get iron from iron ore you need much higher temperatures.
So while it might not be completely inconceivable of some civilizations to skip the bronze age (and the much lesser well known copper age before that) and go straight to iron it is still rather unlikely.
 

Deleted member 97083

I did say smelt. You still need more heat to do that and more skill to do it well.

I don't think you could just jump straight from zero to iron working, that is.
Smelting can occur below the melting point of the metal, when the metal is still solid, but malleable enough to be hammered into shape. The temperature required for smelting is thus 300-400 degrees lower than the melting point. Medieval furnaces of 1000-1200 C were able to smelt iron.
 
Smelting can occur below the melting point of the metal, when the metal is still solid, but malleable enough to be hammered into shape. The temperature required for smelting is thus 300-400 degrees lower than the melting point. Medieval furnaces of 1000-1200 C were able to smelt iron.
I'm not actually disagreeing with you, though I may not be articulating it very well.

The good news is there's a ton of iron in Michigan, so it's likely this society will be able to find the good stuff in the Gogebic and Marquette Ranges fairly quickly once they've got basic metallurgy and bronze-working down pat. It's entirely possible that what you really get is an extended copper age, followed by a brief bronze age as they get into arsenical bronze, then eventually using their knowledge of metallurgy to explore less toxic alternatives, like smelting iron and developing nickel-silver.

There's probably an offshoot of this culture in Minnesota; likely they find the Mesabi range, and you get a trade route that sees pack elk carry iron from *Mountain Iron to *Duluth, where it's loaded onto boats and sailed along Lake Superior to the other major settlement sites.

My heart, incidentally, wants the capital city to be at Sault Ste. Marie or thereabouts, near the rapids, or even on Sugar Island, centred around a big causeway connecting either side of the St. Marys River. Like some kind of First Nations Constantinople.



Incidentally, re. elk chariots: I actually think the main weapons for these guys are the bow and the javelin, with cavalry being basically unheard of. They might also use attack dogs. Swords, maybe, but they've still got elements of a hunter culture and they're more likely to want to kill their enemies quickly across a great distance. By the time Europeans arrive they're likely to find frightfully good Algonquian-speaking archers with arrows tipped with iron or nickel silver.
 

Deleted member 97083

My heart, incidentally, wants the capital city to be at Sault Ste. Marie or thereabouts, near the rapids, or even on Sugar Island, centred around a big causeway connecting either side of the St. Marys River. Like some kind of First Nations Constantinople.
Why not Detroit?
 
I have read about copper being worked, but where is the tin at? You need that for bronze

never mind, found it.. apparently major areas for tin nearest the Great Lakes are either in the Black Hills of South Dakota or the southern Appalachians (according to this)

although New Brunswick has some

https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/1301/report.pdf (page 10 for locations)
 
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it's likely this society will be able to find the good stuff in the Gogebic and Marquette Ranges fairly quickly once they've got basic metallurgy and bronze-working down pat. It's entirely possible that what you really get is an extended copper age, followed by a brief bronze age as they get into arsenical bronze, then eventually using their knowledge of metallurgy to explore less toxic alternatives, like smelting iron and developing nickel-silver.

I really for some reason <3 the idea of a nickel-silver age.
 
Isn't that sort of what sub-Saharan Africa did?
Not much of a bronze age, but virtually straight from stone to iron?
That isn't my area of expertise but it seems so.

The difference here is that the Keweenaw Elk and Copper People start with an abundance of copper right in front of their faces. What you're probably going to get is an extended Copper Age, then a very short Bronze Age when they start toying with arsenical bronze, before they very quickly start experimenting with iron and Sudbury nickel and jump into the Iron Age.
 
With a POD of 8000 BC you could butterfly anything. There's still the challenge of no domesticated beasts of burden so you're likely looking at a very slave-heavy culture.

Caribou which are genetically identical to reindeer, are domesticable, since they have been, by the Saami. If you have earlier communication between north and south America, you can have llamas. Bison have never been proven not to be domesticable.

Check out this old thread for some additional ideas: https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/american-indian-trajectory.34457/
 
Caribou which are genetically identical to reindeer, are domesticable, since they have been, by the Saami. If you have earlier communication between north and south America, you can have llamas. Bison have never been proven not to be domesticable.

Check out this old thread for some additional ideas: https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/american-indian-trajectory.34457/
I've seen theories somewhere or other that you could even domesticate the bighorn sheep - it's just that a lot of North American cultures never got a firm enough agricultural base to be able to take the time to to do it. Quite a few First Nations societies stayed in a model where they moved with the wildlife, sort of like how some of the tribes in Nova Scotia would move up and down the river depending on where the salmon were at that time of year. Even the Haudenosaunee tended to move their settlements every few years.

We've been talking about a society which became basically caribou herders and from there managed to adopt the elk as a pack animal, but mostly because the POD put us after the post-Pleistocene extinction of a lot of North American megafauna. If you bump the POD to about 10,000 BC you have some interesting possibilities. You'll never save all the megafauna, and the prehistoric overkill hypothesis has some holes in it, but you could always play with the idea of a less successful Clovis culture, or a subgroup of it which hunts less and grows more.

"Horses of North America" is a little overdone, but if you really wanted to be fun, you could save one of the North American camels and just have Algonquian-speaking camel riders.
 
With a POD of 8000 BC you could butterfly anything. There's still the challenge of no domesticated beasts of burden so you're likely looking at a very slave-heavy culture.

With a sufficiently early POD you might even be able to prevent the Megafauna extinction in North America which was happen around 10'000. Its of course not clear if the extinct animals could be domesticated but some of their relatives were in other parts of the world. For example there were North American Llamas whose relatives were domesticated in South America. Other potential candidates would be camels, horses and elephantids. Of course we don't know how to prevent the extinction, but the example of the Llamas shows that is was not inevitable conclusion of the human immigration.
 
With a sufficiently early POD you might even be able to prevent the Megafauna extinction in North America which was happen around 10'000. Its of course not clear if the extinct animals could be domesticated but some of their relatives were in other parts of the world. For example there were North American Llamas whose relatives were domesticated in South America. Other potential candidates would be camels, horses and elephantids. Of course we don't know how to prevent the extinction, but the example of the Llamas shows that is was not inevitable conclusion of the human immigration.
I'm thinking you could domesticate even some of the extant animals.

Bighorn sheep have a different social structure than domestic sheep, but they also maintain coherent social groups even without a single dominant male. An agricultural society could probably figure that out. Even caribou and elk could feasibly be semi-domesticated. You'll never have domestic pronghorns, and bison are probably too buff to do that with.

The big limiting factors for these cultures would be that none of the extant fauna are all that rideable.
 
So we're looking at a Bronze Age Great Lakes trading civilisation.

I won't lie - the idea of chariots charging across the Great Plains is epic. I can't see how you wouldn't have a primarily cavalry based army for this civilisation - whilst they can defend their cities with infantry, you couldn't have NA-Hoplites, the terrain is all wrong.

However, those tribes/polities that form on the lake shore near a river in the Mississippi basin are going to have the best time. Rivercraft will allow them to funnel trade to and from each network. I could see heavy infantry being useful for defending cities from river-craft unloading their troops.

I wonder if they'd eventually settle the St.Lawrence river valley. Starting there could eventually lead to more northern settlement, and then interaction with any New World bound Europeans.

Or more of a canoe based force. Remember, the natives tended to let the beaver do their thing. Lots of water meadows, lots of slow flowing streams and rivers. Infantry that move by water can get to a lot of places around the Great Lakes, fast.

As opposed to "broze age" could they hop over Bronze to Iron? Half the reason the bronze age collapsed was that the supply lines for tin fell apart, and Iron while not as strong as bronze, only needed the one component. My knowledge of antiquity is summed up by my high school class so I'm probably wrong

And the Mesabi Iron Range is just off of Superior.
 
The problem with skipping straight to iron is that it melts at about 1500 degrees Celsius. Copper is about 1100 and tin is about 250. You need to get to a point where it's realistic to be able to smelt iron.

Once you can do that, you can dig nickel out of the Sudbury basin and melt it too to give yourself nickel silver.

Melting iron isn't necessary. Only smelting it is, so that it can be worked and shaped. In fact, many Bronze Age furnaces were actually hot enough to smelt iron at 1100-1150 degrees Celsius. However, it took a long time for blacksmiths to become skilled enough, and trade links developed enough, to make working with iron cost-effective compared to bronze.

And the North Americans were adept at using fire, just enough for the purpose. I could see them getting it up to 1100 with little difficulty.
 
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