"Nickel Age" in Melanesia?

One of the problems with kick-starting a Pacific Island civilization is the lack of useful metal deposits. Some of the larger islands have copper and gold, but none have tin for bronzeworking and, as far as I know, none have easily accessible iron (Fiji and PNG have iron sand, but techniques for smelting iron out of sand weren't developed until well into modern times).

New Caledonia is something of an exception. It also doesn't have significant iron reserves, but it does have huge deposits of nickel ore, some of which is at 10 to 15 percent purity.

Now, I know jack about nickel smelting. However, nickel has a melting point of 1455 degrees Celsius while the melting point of iron is 1538 degrees, so a furnace that would melt iron would presumably melt nickel. Nickel is also both malleable and ductile, and can be worked.

Is there any chance, then, that the Kanaks could get the idea of metallurgy through working copper (which also exists on New Caledonia) and then progress to a "Nickel Age?" We know that it's possible to go directly from the Copper Age to the Iron Age, because the West Africans did so; could the same be done with nickel?

I'm probably missing something obvious here, so I'd appreciate advice from the metallurgists and geologists on the forum. There's presumably a reason nickel in its pure form wasn't isolated until the 18th century, although that may have had to do with the fact that deposits like those in New Caledonia are rare and were unknown at the time. But the idea of a classical Nickel Age empire in Melanesia is one that won't let go - could it conceivably happen?
 
The melting of nickel ores releases poisonous fumes, that's why it wasn't around for pre-1700ies. So it won't fly for this reason.
However it depends on the ore, as the Chinese were able to work with nickel in ancient times.
Further, there are Chinese manuscripts suggesting that "white copper" (cupronickel, known as baitong) was used there between 1700 and 1400 BC.
 
The melting of nickel ores releases poisonous fumes, that's why it wasn't around for pre-1700ies. So it won't fly for this reason.
However it depends on the ore, as the Chinese were able to work with nickel in ancient times.

That's definitely a problem, but not necessarily a deal-breaker - arsenical bronze was used for centuries, and that also released toxic fumes when made. Depending on how poisonous the nickel fumes are - i.e., if they kill over years rather than immediately - the New Caledonians might live with them if nickel tools and weapons are useful enough.

I don't believe there are cupronickel ores on New Caledonia (although I'm certainly willing to be proven wrong); the mining today comes from saprolite and laterite ores, some of which also contain cobalt.
 
Hmmm... While pure nickel or nickel/cobalt weapons might not be nearly as good as iron, once somebody tries repairing a broken iron blade sword with a bit of a nickel-cobalt dagger, and discovers alloy steel, they'll be able to trade for iron at advantageous rates.
 
Will nickel take an edge? Can it be sharpened when it grows dull? Reforged?

Will it make nice jewelry? Hmmm. Yes to that one I think. It's pretty malleable.
 
Hmmm... While pure nickel or nickel/cobalt weapons might not be nearly as good as iron, once somebody tries repairing a broken iron blade sword with a bit of a nickel-cobalt dagger, and discovers alloy steel, they'll be able to trade for iron at advantageous rates.

They'd certainly trade for iron as soon as they could get it, just as the arsenical-bronze cultures traded up as soon as they got access to tin. I assume, since they're closer to the western end of the Pacific, the most likely source would be a trade route to Java or the Asian mainland rather than South America.

Will nickel take an edge? Can it be sharpened when it grows dull? Reforged?

That's the question, isn't it? A search for "nickel blades" revealed ads for ceiling fans. A search for "nickel knives" turned up a lot of early 20th-century sources, including one that gave advice on how to set up a WW1-era military cantonment. I'm not sure if these knives were solid nickel or nickel-plated, though, and knives used to cut food don't have to be that sharp.

From what I could find - which is limited to what an amateur can find on the Internet in half an hour's time - there's little evidence that we've manufactured tools or weapons from pure nickel. But then again, we've never had to. By the time nickel was discovered, we had sophisticated steelmaking techniques. So it may be that nickel implements are possible, and that they'd be capable of taking an edge, but that there was never any reason to bother making them. Our hypothetical Kanaks would be in a very different situation.

Again, I'd appreciate guidance from any of our geologists, metallurgists or engineers.
 
They'd certainly trade for iron as soon as they could get it, just as the arsenical-bronze cultures traded up as soon as they got access to tin. I assume, since they're closer to the western end of the Pacific, the most likely source would be a trade route to Java or the Asian mainland rather than South America.



That's the question, isn't it? A search for "nickel blades" revealed ads for ceiling fans. A search for "nickel knives" turned up a lot of early 20th-century sources, including one that gave advice on how to set up a WW1-era military cantonment. I'm not sure if these knives were solid nickel or nickel-plated, though, and knives used to cut food don't have to be that sharp.

From what I could find - which is limited to what an amateur can find on the Internet in half an hour's time - there's little evidence that we've manufactured tools or weapons from pure nickel. But then again, we've never had to. By the time nickel was discovered, we had sophisticated steelmaking techniques. So it may be that nickel implements are possible, and that they'd be capable of taking an edge, but that there was never any reason to bother making them. Our hypothetical Kanaks would be in a very different situation.

Again, I'd appreciate guidance from any of our geologists, metallurgists or engineers.
Nickel coins, and Im thinking older Canadian nickels, were hard enough to use as coins at 99.9%(?) Pure, where copper pennies needed alloying to stand up to wear.

Nickel tools don't need to be as good as steel or iron - they just have to be better than copper (probably not even as good as bronze) to be useful. I cant imagine it not being better than copper, and my gut feeling is it's better than bronze. But I couldnt swear to that.
 
They can use it for jewlery but nickle does not work harden like copper and would be pretty useless as a tool, unless you're making needles. The natives would still be better off using bone.

Nickel is great for making strong steel alloys though.
 
They can use it for jewlery but nickle does not work harden like copper and would be pretty useless as a tool, unless you're making needles. The natives would still be better off using bone.

Nickel is great for making strong steel alloys though.

Could they alloy it with copper to make the kind of metal the ancient Chinese used, or something like monel? There's copper on New Caledonia too, and if they get to the point of smelting nickel, they'd already know how to work it. Would that be strong enough to use for tools?
 
Could they alloy it with copper to make the kind of metal the ancient Chinese used, or something like monel? There's copper on New Caledonia too, and if they get to the point of smelting nickel, they'd already know how to work it. Would that be strong enough to use for tools?

Sure cupronickel is used today for things like coins and utensils. Chances are you've used cupronickel forks and knives. They are highly corrosion resistant, though not used for anything involving serious cutting. I'm sure you can make farming implements, hammers and maces. But then you could just use work hardened copper.
 
Sure cupronickel is used today for things like coins and utensils. Chances are you've used cupronickel forks and knives. They are highly corrosion resistant, though not used for anything involving serious cutting. I'm sure you can make farming implements, hammers and maces. But then you could just use work hardened copper.

In other words, useful but no more so (or little more so) than copper, and no spear points or wood-axes?

All right, last try: monel 400. It's the opposite end of copper-nickel alloys from cupronickel: where cupronickel is mostly copper, monel is about two-thirds nickel. It's harder than either pure copper or pure nickel - as much or more so than bronze - and it's good for marine applications, which would be of obvious use to a Pacific people. It's also, probably, the first kind of alloy the Kanaks would play with, given that nickel is more common on New Caledonia than copper.

The modern Monel 400 alloy contains some trace elements other than nickel and copper (~2 percent iron and manganese) but the Kanaks might be able to approximate that by incorporating iron sand into the smelting process, or else add other trace elements via charcoal the way the Bantu peoples did to make carbon steel. Any chance they could find something workable, given a couple centuries of trial and error?
 
Iron is a ridiculously common metal. Distinguish between iron deposits as in the kind of deposits that would be mined today, that has to have millions of tons of easily extractable high-purity magnetite or hematite and the smaller deposits that could be of use to an iron-age people.

The vikings used to manufacture iron from both lake ore and redsand, and at least the latter is present on new Caledonia. In a stream there could be placer iron (blacksand), also on the beach where I grew up there were beach ore, despite the closest iron mine used in modern age were hundreds of kilometers away.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel...ediaviewer/File:Creek_South_New_Caledonia.JPG

The main source of nickel seems to be Garnerite, which is a hydrous Magnesium Nickel silicate, which also contains Iron.

http://nickel.atomistry.com/nickel_from_garnierite.html

Not a process one would stumble upon. Note a misspelling in the last column, Fe turns into stinky Te :eek:
 
Iron is a ridiculously common metal. Distinguish between iron deposits as in the kind of deposits that would be mined today, that has to have millions of tons of easily extractable high-purity magnetite or hematite and the smaller deposits that could be of use to an iron-age people.

The vikings used to manufacture iron from both lake ore and redsand, and at least the latter is present on new Caledonia. In a stream there could be placer iron (blacksand), also on the beach where I grew up there were beach ore, despite the closest iron mine used in modern age were hundreds of kilometers away.

So sand extraction was practical for premodern people? That seems easier than a speculative Nickel Age, but would the Kanaks get the idea that the iron sands contained metal if they didn't have bog-iron to work with first? If so, an Iron Age transition is possible not only in New Caledonia but PNG and Fiji, which also have ore sands. The Kanaks wouldn't have a monopoly the way they would with nickel, though - classical Melanesia would be a more multipolar place.
 
You are going about this all wrong. What you want is the emergence of a knack cultural feature that impells them go really super hot fires.
 
Top