On Tue, 29 Jun 2004 07:05:25 GMT, Seppo Renfors wrote:
Tom McDonald wrote:
In the context of this thread, at least its original context,
the copper was native copper in the upper Great Lakes area of
the US and Canada. That copper is typically well over 99% pure
out of the ground, and does not have to be smelted to remove
impurities. If another context is in evidence, then a
definition of the term 'pure' is needed.

http://www.dayooper.com/Networks.JPG

The copper may well be 99% pure - what about the rest? It isn't every
day people find huge lumps of pure copper without impurities embedded
within it. This is the dilemma that people bypass and ignore.

This has a good story about the Great lakes Copper deposits.
http://www.geo.msu.edu/geo333/copper.html

As that article notes, 14 billion pounds of copper have been removed
from the area since the ancients were working copper there. Let the
enormity of that number sink in. There was an *awful lot* of copper
there in ancient times, much of it easily accessible from the surface.

Note also, as Neubauer does, that they didn't want "huge lumps".
Copper is difficult to cut with primitive tools (isn't all that much fun
with modern steel chisels). Neubauer suggests that the ancients
would want to start with a piece of about the right size for the
object they wanted to make. At most that would be a lump weighing
a few pounds, in the vast majority of cases it would be a lump smaller
than a hen's egg. Even today, such lumps are relatively plentiful in
the copper belt. They were vastly more so 6,000 years ago before
modern industrial man started extracting copper from the region.

Gary