[selleck]

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]

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_]

Yes, but they were not nearly advanced enough for metallurgy and the like. Their artifacts, while no less important, fade away far quicker.

[AlotOfReading]

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_]

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_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]

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

[ummonk]

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

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]

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]

Stone artifacts last longer than metal ones.

[ummonk]

It’s the other way around - stone lasts, while advanced metallurgy (iron) has a tendency to rust away.

[voz_]

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]

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]

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.

[freeflight]

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.

[s1artibartfast]

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

[ransom1538]

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

[sushsjsuauahab]

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

[ummonk]

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

[MaxHoppersGhost]

Population density of Native Americans was low and their wares were not particularly durable. Good luck finding something.

[ummonk]

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]

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.