Author's Note:
The following reports came to me from the late Evan Hansen, an archaeology enthusiast who was, like many others in America, a critic of our professional archaeologists who have summarily dismissed evidence that does not fit into their orthodoxy. Such criticism from enthusiasts is at times off the mark, and at times doesn't reflect an understanding of the accepted methodology of professional archaeology. However, it is from people like Hansen that reports of interesting and colorful archaeological anomalies originate; otherwise such phenomena might just be swept under the rug.
Hansen was made aware of Ohio 's mysterious furnaces by reading Mallery's "Lost America," and also by reading reports of the work of my colleagues and I in amateur archaeological publications.
Hohokam trash pile iron suspended from a magnet.
(Hansen photo)
Evan Hansen reports:
"During 1966-67 I was working at Arizona State University training Vista volunteers for work on Indian reservations. Vista was a domestic version of the Peace Corps... The Vista training was done at the Maricopa colony of the Gila River Reservation, southwest of Phoenix, at the end of Baseline Road... The VISTA...at Maricopa was working out of mobile homes and, I didn't know it at the time, we sitting on top of a Hohokam trash pile, with pottery fragments dating it around 1200 AD. Because this was in a heavily populated area, all surface shards had been picked up long before. When our contract was cancelled and we had to remove the mobile homes, I dug down in front of the wheels so we could pull them out, and this uncovered the old trash pile..."
Hansen said shortly after he arrived at the Maricopa colony, "...we had a heavy rain one night. When I went out the next morning, I noticed that the rain washed out a lot of trash from the ground. Mostly it was stone chips and a few pottery shards, but along with these were several chunks of dark brown rock that didn't belong in the silt of that locality. When I picked one up, it was abnormally heavy. I've done a bit of prospecting, so I knew heavy rock will almost invariably mean a metal content. So I decided to crush and pan the rock to see if it might be gold. To my surprise, it didn't pan. I picked up one of these chunks and noticed that it was heavy. This made me suspect that it was ore of some kind. There were several pieces of this, so I crushed a small one and tried to pan it. To my surprise, no separation occurred. It was all heavy and I suspected iron. This was proven when a magnet picked up all of it."
Upon examining one piece of iron, Hansen saw that it was made of layers. "The chunk...shows four of these layers, which indicates that this chunk was folded and re-hammered twice." After his success with the magnet, Hansen said he "poked around in the soil" and "found several other chunks of the rusty iron..."
Hansen goes on to describe direct reduction iron smelting and how the wrought iron produced was folded and forged into layers to fashion tools and blades. Shovel blades made of laminated wrought iron were found during excavations of several southern Ohio direct reduction process iron furnaces.
Go to Ohio's Prehistoric Furnaces for more information about wrought iron metallurgy.
About a mile south of the Vista area at the Maricopa colony, Hansen said he found "the remains of a big city. Much of the area has been destroyed by plowing up for farmland, but in 1967, the undisturbed part was a half mile east-west and a quarter mile north-west. About 80 percent of this had some kind of ruin, mostly trash heaps, but also included a ball court... The Maricopas didn't want any excavations on this ancient city, but they did give me permission for any kind of surface tests I could do that didn't disturb anything."
Hansen said he used a type of metal detector which gives negative readings when exposed to magnetite, which occurs naturally in the soil, or, exposed to rusty iron. If passed over "refined metal, the tone rises in pitch and the needle goes up..." to indicate a positive reading, he explained.
"When I tried this metal detector on the ancient city it gave negative readings over every trash pile. Many times enough iron was present to put it to zero. There was only one positive reading that I ever found and, by coincidence, a badger had dug a hole there. I found a few flakes of thin copper plate in the dirt from this badger hole. But this was no surprise although conventional archaeology does not recognize that copper was used in ancient Arizona."
"Saw cut timbers in Pueblo Bonito." (Hansen photo)
Again, Evan Hansen reports:
"Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico is the biggest ruin in the west. Though now collapsed, it's a big, D-shaped ruin covering three acres and once had as many as 800 rooms... and was either four or five stories high. Every timber in that building was cut by a saw and some still show scratches of the saw teeth." Hansen believes copper and iron tools were used in ancient times in the Southwest Indian pueblos. "In all my travels I have never yet seen a single old timber that has been cut by a stone axe. All were cut by saws. Even the empty socket holes will still have square ends, proving saw-cut timbers were used."
At Pueblo Alto, on the cliff above Bonito, there is an unexcavated room that has all the stone turned red by intense heat. I think that this was the smelter where they refined their iron. I found the source of the iron ore. A sandstone layer near the top of the cliff above Bonito is full of iron concretions. This is a low-grade ore by modern standards, but a welding torch is hot enough to turn this magnetic, so it is rich enough to smelt for iron. The ground in front of this pile of red stones is deeply littered with chunks of these iron concretions. There is no proof until this is excavated, but there is reason enough to think that this was a smelter.
"I did find a known smelter in a ruin about five miles west of Zuni. Slag from this smelter is nearly identical to slag a century old from an early Mormon iron smelter near my home. I have no way of knowing if iron was refined in this, or some other metal, but the slag has so many bubbles that it had to have a forced air draft. Pottery in this ruin identified this as Anasazi of the time around 1200 AD."
"A Maricopa man told me of an old iron mine in the north end of the Sierra Estrella Mountains, but I was never able to find it. He even gave me a sample of the ore, which is crystalline magnetite, actually lodestone, rich enough to be naturally magnetic... I did find a lot of magnetite in the area, so the ore is there to have been used."
While the author of this web site believes it unlikely iron was smelted in pre-Columbian Arizona or New Mexico, he does believe it quite possible copper and even bronze artifacts could have been used there because both were made and used in nearby Mexico by native American peoples, including the Aztecs. There may be some other reason for the metal detector readings, or for the presence of the material which is being detected.