I'm not convinced. The reason the natives didn't have the ability to forge iron was more related to there were no good ore deposits to work with. If you are intelligent and see a blacksmith work a few times you can figure out how to forge iron if given some - it is a lot of effort and your first attempts will not be good, but if something is broken you don't lose anything by putting it in a fire and attempting to fix it. (a camp fire gets plenty hot for blacksmithing - just wait for the coals and then blow on them) However the lack of quality ores that were easy to get at meant that they didn't have any metal working in that part of the world and so of course they wouldn't know how to do it. Iron would have made the natives life much better if they had it, and they were smart enough to figure out how to work it from scratch if they had it (they have centuries to learn just like the rest of us)
Which is to say the facts are fit equally well by saying "The natives saw blacksmiths work in the colonists. So when aliens took the colonists way in a spaceship after they collected the iron which remained and learned to forge them into useful tools for themselves". Ridiculous of course, but it fits the facts just as well.
> they have centuries to learn just like the rest of us
This seems like a massive assumption to make. Sub Saharan Africa has tons of iron ore and it’s still debated whether or not they developed iron working on their own. Your point relies on (an approximation of) blank slatism which seems highly highly unlikely given the natural variation in all other areas of life.
Okay, I'll grant that they might not have developed iron working if it was possible. However that doesn't change the larger point that it was impossible for anyone living in that area to develop metal working as metals were not available. No matter how much ability you have, you will never develop metal working because you need a large existing industrial base to use the ores in North America. (there is/was a lot of high grade ore in North America, it just isn't near the surface)
a camp fire gets plenty hot for blacksmithing - just wait for the coals and then blow on them
Maybe if you're working with bronze or copper, but iron forging requires much higher temperatures than a campfire can provide. That's why the iron age took place after the bronze age, forges capable of making iron workable were not yet invented. It wasn't a trivial invention.
Charcoal - which you get from campfires is hot enough. It takes a lot more of it though and a lot of other effort. when bronze is available it is generally good enough and a lot easier, but historians tell me iron was used throughout the bronze age in small amounts. iron really needs steel to be signicantly better than iron and that took a while-
A lot of colonial iron came from Southern NJ. And this wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bog_iron
says it was produced at spots along the coast. South Jersey had a very clean water called "cedar water" that is high in tannins from a freshwater seaweed that was well suited to storage and really set the stage for transoceanic voyages at scale. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cedar_water
Most early American ironworks extracted the iron ore from "bog iron" deposits - large nodules of quite pure iron that forms along the roots of plants in boggy areas. Bog iron could be easily scooped up from the mucky bottom with long-handled rakes into flat-bottomed boats and then dried on shore.
Is blowing on it really good enough? People don't have that much breath, and you'd have to put your face right up to the heat.
You could use a blowpipe of some sort. But better, a bellows. Was there any evidence of either?
Although the South and Central Americans worked bronze, the North Americans did not. I doubt a leap directly from nothing to iron smithing could occur.
They didn't have metal options - in north america metals are mostly found in deep mines.
I agree that blowing is not ideal - but it would work. A flat board as a fan, or even bellows are options. The larger point is none of these would leave evidence behind.
I am also skeptical that the iron scale was "proof positive" but the anecdote about reading from books seemed pretty convincing about the integration:
> "We have one little snippet of historical evidence from the 1700s, which describes people with blue or gray eyes who could remember people who used to be able to read from books,"
I’m not convinced either. If they assimilated into nearby native populations, wouldn’t someone have found a colonist or a descendant that could tell the story?
Oral history is not very good at long term tales. I know my grand parents stories, but even my great grand parents is something that I know little about and I have trouble passing that on to my kids (and that includes the great grandpa who was murdered and thus a more compelling story)
I have family in the area and my impression from archeological and historical news, articles and books from there is there isn't really one definitive moment where everyone in the colony just kind of up and left to the same place at the same time. If I had to bet, there was a kind of gradual process of degradation of the colony and some went one way and others went another.
This was interesting to read and it seems kind of definitive, and my impression is it's consistent with other things I've read. But if I recall correctly, there's also evidence from other sites that some from the colony also went elsewhere.
It seems reasonable to me to think that if things were breaking down, there might be differences of thought or preference about where to go, and that they might have also assumed they weren't totally cutting off contact from one another, being in the same area.
I'm not really an expert, but in general there's kind of two or three main sets of theories for resettlement: The "Croatoan Island" theory, the "mainland" theories, and "combination" theories. Most involve assimilation into the different native populations in the area, or some assistance from them, but not all.
My memory is fuzzy but I think a few years ago they found in a site on the mainland some artifacts that seemed to be from that time period — the site was one that locals had kind of talked about for years and when they did an archeological study of it it turned out to have some substance. But what I remember was that there was no evidence of a permanent settlement and they couldn't definitively tell why the artifacts were there, so they couldn't tell if some of the colonists had been there, or how long, or if the artifacts had come from trade with natives, or had been washed there from elsewhere, or what.
The area involves a lot of ecological and geographic change over time due to hurricanes and is sort of a maze of inlets, islands, and marshes, so it's easy for me to imagine it being difficult to study archeologically speaking, or why people would "disappear".
There were native people living there (in ways that leave little trace in the archaeological record), I've heard it argued that many colonists may have chosen to join them.
This may come as a surprise to you, but there were many settlements in America before Europeans ever showed up.
No other British settlements in the hemisphere, though. Failed expeditions did end up in other nations colonies, but this was never pleasant for either side. But they would have had to go hundreds of kilometers by sea to find other Europeans, without a proper ship and on meager supplies. Joining the natives was the best way to survive… but which natives?
The 1619 project touched on this well. Slaves and indentured servants snuck away and joined native settlements and even had fringe settlements of their own eventually.
Working in one of the colonies for some rich guy prioritizing tobacco to pay dividends over food wasn’t a fun time.
The Jamestown colonists starved to death literally living on the shore of the most productive marine environment on earth. They didn’t know how to care for the fishing nets, so they rotted, and then didn’t know how to fix them.
The issue was that many of the colonists were second sons of relatively wealthy families, and weren’t all that familiar with fishing or farming. The first son inherited everything, and the second son had to make his way in the world, and colonizing was an enticing prospect for making your fortune. Poorer families, at the very early stages, weren’t sending their sons on these ventures because they needed the labor at home.
As someone who grew up next to Jamestown, I can add some context.
John Smith, one of Jamestown's leaders, was not from a wealthy or privileged background. "The issue" may have been less about class and more about poor organization, leadership and unrealistic expectations.
Fishing and farming skills also deserve context. The soil around Jamestown was marshy and brackish, unsuitable for traditional English farming methods. Yes there were lots of fish but they only ran seasonally (sturgeon etc). The "starving time" you are referencing was made worse by a drought and cutoff trade with the indians
This mostly fails a sniff test to me? And indeed, reading the linked article doesn't support your editorializing. To quote: "There is some evidence that they had poor fishing skills, but other factors may have contributed more to their failures"
The idea that they were not nearly as efficient at building a town as they could have been is not at all surprising. All the more so when you consider just how different the storm season was compared to what they were used to.
But the idea that they failed due to their own inadequacies feels like a stretch? Like, had they "stayed home" what kind of life do you think they had there? People used to have to do far more of their own survival than modern people can really understand.
I've got a great example of this. I'm renting a house that provides a gas powered lawnmower for tenants to use, and I've elected to just let the grass grow because I have no idea how to use the thing
How would you have prepared, were you in their shoes? Roanoke Island was first landed in 1585. The only foreknowledge of the area would have been wildly embellished and optimistic reports (competing for financing, royal favor and prestige) from the likes of Spanish and French expeditions, or Sir Francis Drake. This was mostly limited to coastal recon and said little of the dangers of malaria, indian politics, seasonality, etc.
For example, the Amadas-Barlowe Expedition (1584) described Roanoke Island as "the most plentiful, sweet, fruitful and wholesome of all the world," with fertile soil, abundant wildlife, and friendly natives
Old world politics at the time explain most of this. Some of the english colonies were, ugh, rushed and less well funded than they would have been under ideal situations.
This is basically the same reason they didn't look too hard to see what happened to the Roanoke colony.
Not unlike youth in our current society who leave home then bounce around from one place to another until they find the spot they want to settle in for a while.
I mean sure, colonists from hundreds of years ago are different than young adults of today.... but the tenuous nature, in general, of people out exploring the world for a new home is unsurprising.
The native population of the area was well mixed with European and African genes in the 18th and 19th century. It would be very difficult to determine whether there was also mixture in the late 16th / early 17th century.
400-year-old traces would be hard to detect owing to admixture, but if they could find identical-by-descent segments that would be very compelling, as the research into Native American traces found in Polynesian populations shows:
If Croatoan ceremonies didn't involve cremation it could be quite a bit easier.. I don't really see the article's evidence as very compelling. Many things may have been collected from the site and ultimately discarded in the trash heaps without the proposed integration.
The English have good records. We could perhaps find the decendents of relatives who stayed put and then find their "hey you guys seem to have more DNA in common than you ought to" counterparts of native american heritage.
The way it works for molecular phylogeny is that you try to find things that are conserved. E.g. if you find a small village in Europe where people haven't moved around much and you find a rare mutation that is also present in one other part of the US, then you might be able to put some numbers on the likelihood that this mutation/gene came from a the original place. Find a second gene, find some artefacts from the right place/time and you have an emerging picture.
I'm not convinced. The reason the natives didn't have the ability to forge iron was more related to there were no good ore deposits to work with. If you are intelligent and see a blacksmith work a few times you can figure out how to forge iron if given some - it is a lot of effort and your first attempts will not be good, but if something is broken you don't lose anything by putting it in a fire and attempting to fix it. (a camp fire gets plenty hot for blacksmithing - just wait for the coals and then blow on them) However the lack of quality ores that were easy to get at meant that they didn't have any metal working in that part of the world and so of course they wouldn't know how to do it. Iron would have made the natives life much better if they had it, and they were smart enough to figure out how to work it from scratch if they had it (they have centuries to learn just like the rest of us)
Which is to say the facts are fit equally well by saying "The natives saw blacksmiths work in the colonists. So when aliens took the colonists way in a spaceship after they collected the iron which remained and learned to forge them into useful tools for themselves". Ridiculous of course, but it fits the facts just as well.
> they have centuries to learn just like the rest of us
This seems like a massive assumption to make. Sub Saharan Africa has tons of iron ore and it’s still debated whether or not they developed iron working on their own. Your point relies on (an approximation of) blank slatism which seems highly highly unlikely given the natural variation in all other areas of life.
Okay, I'll grant that they might not have developed iron working if it was possible. However that doesn't change the larger point that it was impossible for anyone living in that area to develop metal working as metals were not available. No matter how much ability you have, you will never develop metal working because you need a large existing industrial base to use the ores in North America. (there is/was a lot of high grade ore in North America, it just isn't near the surface)
a camp fire gets plenty hot for blacksmithing - just wait for the coals and then blow on them
Maybe if you're working with bronze or copper, but iron forging requires much higher temperatures than a campfire can provide. That's why the iron age took place after the bronze age, forges capable of making iron workable were not yet invented. It wasn't a trivial invention.
Charcoal - which you get from campfires is hot enough. It takes a lot more of it though and a lot of other effort. when bronze is available it is generally good enough and a lot easier, but historians tell me iron was used throughout the bronze age in small amounts. iron really needs steel to be signicantly better than iron and that took a while-
2 replies →
A lot of colonial iron came from Southern NJ. And this wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bog_iron says it was produced at spots along the coast. South Jersey had a very clean water called "cedar water" that is high in tannins from a freshwater seaweed that was well suited to storage and really set the stage for transoceanic voyages at scale. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cedar_water
Most early American ironworks extracted the iron ore from "bog iron" deposits - large nodules of quite pure iron that forms along the roots of plants in boggy areas. Bog iron could be easily scooped up from the mucky bottom with long-handled rakes into flat-bottomed boats and then dried on shore.
Is blowing on it really good enough? People don't have that much breath, and you'd have to put your face right up to the heat.
You could use a blowpipe of some sort. But better, a bellows. Was there any evidence of either?
Although the South and Central Americans worked bronze, the North Americans did not. I doubt a leap directly from nothing to iron smithing could occur.
Whether or not forced air (blowing) would be necessary would depend on the coal temp, metal size, and how you want to shape the metal.
Simple forging of small enough pieces within a large enough coal bed might not even require forced air to reach a workable temp.
They didn't have metal options - in north america metals are mostly found in deep mines.
I agree that blowing is not ideal - but it would work. A flat board as a fan, or even bellows are options. The larger point is none of these would leave evidence behind.
I am also skeptical that the iron scale was "proof positive" but the anecdote about reading from books seemed pretty convincing about the integration:
> "We have one little snippet of historical evidence from the 1700s, which describes people with blue or gray eyes who could remember people who used to be able to read from books,"
I’m not convinced either. If they assimilated into nearby native populations, wouldn’t someone have found a colonist or a descendant that could tell the story?
Oral history is not very good at long term tales. I know my grand parents stories, but even my great grand parents is something that I know little about and I have trouble passing that on to my kids (and that includes the great grandpa who was murdered and thus a more compelling story)
I have family in the area and my impression from archeological and historical news, articles and books from there is there isn't really one definitive moment where everyone in the colony just kind of up and left to the same place at the same time. If I had to bet, there was a kind of gradual process of degradation of the colony and some went one way and others went another.
This was interesting to read and it seems kind of definitive, and my impression is it's consistent with other things I've read. But if I recall correctly, there's also evidence from other sites that some from the colony also went elsewhere.
It seems reasonable to me to think that if things were breaking down, there might be differences of thought or preference about where to go, and that they might have also assumed they weren't totally cutting off contact from one another, being in the same area.
Where did they go?
Were there other settlements ?
I'm not really an expert, but in general there's kind of two or three main sets of theories for resettlement: The "Croatoan Island" theory, the "mainland" theories, and "combination" theories. Most involve assimilation into the different native populations in the area, or some assistance from them, but not all.
My memory is fuzzy but I think a few years ago they found in a site on the mainland some artifacts that seemed to be from that time period — the site was one that locals had kind of talked about for years and when they did an archeological study of it it turned out to have some substance. But what I remember was that there was no evidence of a permanent settlement and they couldn't definitively tell why the artifacts were there, so they couldn't tell if some of the colonists had been there, or how long, or if the artifacts had come from trade with natives, or had been washed there from elsewhere, or what.
The area involves a lot of ecological and geographic change over time due to hurricanes and is sort of a maze of inlets, islands, and marshes, so it's easy for me to imagine it being difficult to study archeologically speaking, or why people would "disappear".
There were native people living there (in ways that leave little trace in the archaeological record), I've heard it argued that many colonists may have chosen to join them.
1 reply →
This may come as a surprise to you, but there were many settlements in America before Europeans ever showed up.
No other British settlements in the hemisphere, though. Failed expeditions did end up in other nations colonies, but this was never pleasant for either side. But they would have had to go hundreds of kilometers by sea to find other Europeans, without a proper ship and on meager supplies. Joining the natives was the best way to survive… but which natives?
1 reply →
The 1619 project touched on this well. Slaves and indentured servants snuck away and joined native settlements and even had fringe settlements of their own eventually.
Working in one of the colonies for some rich guy prioritizing tobacco to pay dividends over food wasn’t a fun time.
The experience of early colonists is so fascinating. Some of these colonies were very tenuous and seemed very unprepared.
The Jamestown colonists starved to death literally living on the shore of the most productive marine environment on earth. They didn’t know how to care for the fishing nets, so they rotted, and then didn’t know how to fix them.
The issue was that many of the colonists were second sons of relatively wealthy families, and weren’t all that familiar with fishing or farming. The first son inherited everything, and the second son had to make his way in the world, and colonizing was an enticing prospect for making your fortune. Poorer families, at the very early stages, weren’t sending their sons on these ventures because they needed the labor at home.
https://historicjamestowne.org/wp-content/uploads/Subsistenc...
As someone who grew up next to Jamestown, I can add some context.
John Smith, one of Jamestown's leaders, was not from a wealthy or privileged background. "The issue" may have been less about class and more about poor organization, leadership and unrealistic expectations.
Fishing and farming skills also deserve context. The soil around Jamestown was marshy and brackish, unsuitable for traditional English farming methods. Yes there were lots of fish but they only ran seasonally (sturgeon etc). The "starving time" you are referencing was made worse by a drought and cutoff trade with the indians
3 replies →
This mostly fails a sniff test to me? And indeed, reading the linked article doesn't support your editorializing. To quote: "There is some evidence that they had poor fishing skills, but other factors may have contributed more to their failures"
The idea that they were not nearly as efficient at building a town as they could have been is not at all surprising. All the more so when you consider just how different the storm season was compared to what they were used to.
But the idea that they failed due to their own inadequacies feels like a stretch? Like, had they "stayed home" what kind of life do you think they had there? People used to have to do far more of their own survival than modern people can really understand.
6 replies →
Jamestown also starved because they tried collective farming (communism). It didn't work for them any more than it worked for anyone else.
So did the Pilgrims for their first year. They starved, too.
11 replies →
Even today, with modern information available to us, people still woefully underestimate what it would take to live in a true wilderness.
I've got a great example of this. I'm renting a house that provides a gas powered lawnmower for tenants to use, and I've elected to just let the grass grow because I have no idea how to use the thing
19 replies →
How would you have prepared, were you in their shoes? Roanoke Island was first landed in 1585. The only foreknowledge of the area would have been wildly embellished and optimistic reports (competing for financing, royal favor and prestige) from the likes of Spanish and French expeditions, or Sir Francis Drake. This was mostly limited to coastal recon and said little of the dangers of malaria, indian politics, seasonality, etc.
For example, the Amadas-Barlowe Expedition (1584) described Roanoke Island as "the most plentiful, sweet, fruitful and wholesome of all the world," with fertile soil, abundant wildlife, and friendly natives
>were very tenuous and seemed very unprepared.
Old world politics at the time explain most of this. Some of the english colonies were, ugh, rushed and less well funded than they would have been under ideal situations.
This is basically the same reason they didn't look too hard to see what happened to the Roanoke colony.
It was the VC model of colonization. They expected a few sites to fail to prosper.
Not unlike youth in our current society who leave home then bounce around from one place to another until they find the spot they want to settle in for a while.
I mean sure, colonists from hundreds of years ago are different than young adults of today.... but the tenuous nature, in general, of people out exploring the world for a new home is unsurprising.
No I don’t think they are anything alike.
Is this story available from a reputable source?
If this is the case then there should be DNA evidence as well. Presuming that assimilation led to procreation.
The native population of the area was well mixed with European and African genes in the 18th and 19th century. It would be very difficult to determine whether there was also mixture in the late 16th / early 17th century.
400-year-old traces would be hard to detect owing to admixture, but if they could find identical-by-descent segments that would be very compelling, as the research into Native American traces found in Polynesian populations shows:
https://gizmodo.com/native-americans-voyaged-to-polynesia-lo...
If Croatoan ceremonies didn't involve cremation it could be quite a bit easier.. I don't really see the article's evidence as very compelling. Many things may have been collected from the site and ultimately discarded in the trash heaps without the proposed integration.
There's no descendants, bones, or other source of DNA known to belong to the colonists to work from.
The English have good records. We could perhaps find the decendents of relatives who stayed put and then find their "hey you guys seem to have more DNA in common than you ought to" counterparts of native american heritage.
The way it works for molecular phylogeny is that you try to find things that are conserved. E.g. if you find a small village in Europe where people haven't moved around much and you find a rare mutation that is also present in one other part of the US, then you might be able to put some numbers on the likelihood that this mutation/gene came from a the original place. Find a second gene, find some artefacts from the right place/time and you have an emerging picture.
TLDR: the Roanoke Colony moved to Hatteras Island.
From a backbarrier island to a barrier island (towards the sea)
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