Sold for $482,000 inclusive of Buyer's Premium
 

Bonham's June 1 sale of Pacific Northwest Dagger! Chief Legaic Engraved Dagger, Tsimshian, c. 1790-1830.

Well, i certainly don't have that kind of money, but that is one fantastic dagger. Dare I say that perhaps such a blade shouldn't even be in a private collection, but in a museum where everyone can see it? :)

IT IS AS NICE A ONE AS I HAVE EVER SEEN. THESE APPEAR TO BE MORE OF A SHORT SWORD THAN A KNIFE THIS ONE IS 21 &3/4 INCH LONG WHICH IS THE APPROXIMATE SIZE OF SEVERAL I HAVE SEEN, HAS ANYONE NEVER SEEN A 10 TO 8 INCH ONE?. I AM ASSUMING THE BLADE AND POMMEL ARE MADE FROM ONE CONTINOUS PIECE OF METAL. REMARKABLE WORKMANSHIP.!!
THANKS FOR POSTING THIS ONE LEE :D I WOULDN'T HAVE WANTED TO HAVE MISSED SEEING IT.

Nice

Just wonderful. You do not just suddenly start making things like this. Clearly this must have been made before 1830. Why do we not have better historic information about when this type of work started? Did these people steal iron from Cook's ship too :D .

Here is a helpful link for this discussion as this is not the first time we have talked about such blades here. Also follow the link i posted on this page and there is a lot of good info and photos: http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/showth...hlight=Tlingit

It so happens that the area under disscusion is rich in iron ore. Could be another one of those arguements like the use of brass in Africa. Poor modern historical documentation, limited archeaology coupled with a high minded and dissmisive period. These late 19th and early 20th century thoughts are increasingly being questioned. Todays research it undertaken with less baggage. I am not saying anything but it is possible :shrug: .

I wonder if museums would be willing to spend such an amount on one knife ?

Nice knife btw :)

I think that would depend on which museum. ;)
Don't get me wrong. I am not, in general, against personal ownership of cultural items. But this is not an everyman's dagger, or even a wealthy man's dagger. Daggers like these are akin in my mind to the royal regalia of one of the Javanese kraton. They have deep historical and cultural importance and significance.

Dear David,

I fully agree with you on the importance of such objects.
But do the musea in North America think the same way ?

Do they have pieces like this in musea ?

Best regards,
Willem

Well my first hope is that most of these are still held by representatives of active tribes and continue to be ritually used.
Frankly i don't want to second guess how museums think, but i've rarely had much faith in them to do the right thing in regards to identification or presentation. One that i do really like (though i have not been there in years) is the American Indian Museum in NYC. I don't know if they have an example of this type of dagger in their collections, but i would think that there is at least a fair chance that they do. :shrug: :)

Well, they have one in the National American Indian Museum in Washington.
http://americanindian.si.edu/searchc...9566&culid=453

Here are a couple more in their collection. :)
http://americanindian.si.edu/searchc...Knife%2fDagger
Interesting that the first one here has a sheath for the hilt/pommel. :cool:

....and just to put 2 nails in the answer, these 2 blades that i linked to earlier were both returned to tribes by museums, so i guess the answer is a resounding yes. ;) :)

And i just noticed that the bear dagger also has a sheath for the hilt. :cool: :) :cool:

I really don't think these daggers are older than 1835-50 certainly not 1700s. I can't be sure but I think that the introduction of iron to the west coast tribes had to come after 1805 unless the Spanish traded with these tribes and taught them how to forge iron and steel weapons. Copper weapons yes but iron is much harder to forge and the fuller work looks very sophisticated to me. I will do some research and get back to you.

FIRST CONTACT WITH EUROPEANS
Europeans arrived in Tlingit country for the first time in 1741, when Russian explorer Aleksey Chirikov sent a boatload of men to land for water near the modern site of Sitka. When the group did not return for several days, he sent another boat of men to shore; they also did not return. Thereafter, contact with Tlingit people was limited until well into the 1800s.

The site stated that American involvement did not start until the 1860s and I am pretty sure that these daggers are from 1860s-90s.

Metallurgy of the Tlingit, Dene and Eskimo
 

I ran across a bulletin fro the University of Pennsylvania Vol 11, Number 3 Spring of 1969. Dealer who sold it may have more but is gone until October. The bulletin has a variety of information by John Witthoft and His wife Francis Eyman. They talked about sources of meteorite for steel. Also from ship wrecks. They felt strongly that metallurgy was going on in the interior of Alaska before contact with outsiders. They identified Three sources of copper.
The Tlingits' were used to working with stone tools and sawed their copper with stone Their blades had an applied ridge. The Athabaskans Dene were actually forging and tempering copper blades in their fires. Dene type blades are voluted handled blades by 1850 steel had replaced copper blades. Back to reading some more. i was a bunch taken back by the price this fantastic knife brought, but, had to laugh at the string holding the hide on the hilt.

I got lucky enough to repatriate one from new york back to Alaska it's now about 150 miles North of where it came from originally. The Copper river where all the tasty Red Salmon come from.

Archer

Inuits did have a supply of meteorite iron from a large meteorite they made spear points and small knives from it but they were crude pieces not the highly stylized daggers we see here. It would be very difficult to forge a large knife from just using iron meteorites. Its quite brittle and must be blended with other iron and steel to form a usuable billet in order to make a large dagger.

Not trying to hyjack this thread but... Thought I would re-submit this dagger, to a different audience. David, you were very helpful. I'm having trouble believing, that it is African, as stated by so many. :shrug: I can only post the link. Maybe someone else can bring up pictures. http://vikingsword.com/vb/showthread...orthwest+coast

Better pictures might help, ones that show the white substance more cearly. It still looks unusual to me.

Tlingit
 

Well as quickly as I thought I might have found some good incite on these daggers. I find the authors discredited. link http://www.fenimoreartmuseum.org/fil...haw/search.htm This link shows other daggers and clicking the last one will bring up http://www.fenimoreartmuseum.org/fil...t1/e10554a.htm Note it discredits John Witthofts claims. Sorry, Tim, I removed most of the starchy substance with a toothpick awhile back. Here are some closeups. Sorry about bringing an oxcart into a discussion on Mercedes.

I don't think Archer's example is at all the same category of dagger that we are discussing here though it is interesting to see.
Your link to the discrediting of the author you cite doesn't lead to an article. Do you have another link? I am not sure what claims are discredited, but this is not the first time i have heard of meteorite as a source of iron for some of these daggers, the "Killer Whale" dagger in particular. :shrug: :)

Links
 

Sorry in 1st link type in "dagger" click search. to see other daggers.
2nd link is the one (in history) that discusses stone working copper, etc.

Steve

Ritual use.
 

Just to prick this topic a little- here is an extract from "Miskwabik- Metal of Ritual, Amelia M. Trevelyan, The University Press Of Kentucky" Which mentions the history of denial about Native American metalwork from the North East, all be it that the book is about copper. The general idea is that work was fashioned from "float copper" the copper was not just picked up in the top layer of soil but obtained from extensive mining. Much of the copper had to be extracted from a surounding matrix of stone and spoil by fire. Okay this is not stricktly smelting ore but shows an understanding of the concept. One has to assume that indeed a degree of smelting may have occured in this process. I see a similarity to Brass in sub-saharan Africa inspite of a great deal of evidence in both cases.

As to iron in the Pacific North West could it be a similar situation? very small scale ritual production? again as in the case for Brass in sub-saharan Africa, native production being replaced by more easy to come by trade iron. The maturity of artistic expression and forge work seen in PNW iron work makes me think of a strong tradition only to decline with contact and trade.

Just food for thought I am not a qualifide acedemic.

Hi all, there's some interesting info and pics here....

http://www.livinglandscapes.bc.ca/up...gger/app2.html

Hi All,

Couple of historical notes, somewhat off topic:

There was indigenous ironworking going on in the Arctic--the Greenland Arctic. Bits of the Cape York Meteorite (which landed on the Cape York Peninsula, NW Greenland roughly 10,000 years ago) were being cut off and cold forged into blades at least 1000 years ago (ref: McGhee, Ancient People of the Arctic, 2001). The meteorite is currently at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH link)

I'm still looking for images of these blades, but I suspect that they would have been small tools, rather than big daggers. Cold forging means pounding a flake into shape and scraping it sharp, and that would take a lot of effort to make any sort of useful blade.

I'd also point out that the "Old Copper Complex" in the western Great Lakes area dates back to 6,000 years ago, although copper working was confined to jewelry by 3,000 years ago. Apparently, when the copper mines in Michigan were found by Europeans, they were human-worked pits with the tools still in them.

Basically, copper working isn't new to North America. The big issue to make it work is heat and technology. Copper melts at 1085 deg. C, about 200 deg C hotter than a campfire. Because of this, you need some precursor technology, such as a pottery kiln, to provide expertise and technology in getting the proper temperatures. Iron can be similarly worked in a bloomery at 950 deg C up (1070 deg. C is apparently optimal). This is lower than the temperature required to melt iron (1538 deg C), but importantly, it requires bellows and charcoal to work.

So if we're looking for a culture that has independently developed iron or copper smelting, I think it's a safe guess that they'd also have things like ceramic pots, probably bellows (or at least blow tubes), and some other technological infrastructure lying around. While I have great admiration for the skills of the tribes of the Pacific Northwest and Pacific Arctic, they weren't potters. Rather, they were carvers and weavers. Prior to Contact, I think they worked native copper lumps whenever they could find them, but they didn't start working big sheets of copper until those were available through trade with the Europeans (the copper was used to coat the hull to make it worm-proof, and ships carried extra for repairs).

So far as figuring out how old the daggers are, I think this sets an upper limit. They probably could not have been produced prior to European contact. The tribes didn't have the precursor technology necessary to get enough copper (let alone iron) to make them. However, other groups (notably the Hawaiians) learned how to work with iron quite quickly after they met their first blacksmiths, and I'd bet that's the case for the PNW as well. They weren't stupid people, after all, just limited to the technology that their local environment could sustain.

My 0.00002 cents,

F

Good points Fearn. I think the idea of oxygenating a fire is not hard to grasp even if an area is not known for ceramic production. One just has to think of the low fired ceramic wares from Africa, often fired on an open fire or smouldering dung fire. Yet we see African smelting of iron from a hole in the ground, the fire oxygenated from simple bag bellows. I would imagine simple smelting sites like these would present problems for archaeologists to differentiate from domestic hreaths? The picture is from "Kwakiul Art, Audrey Hawthorn, University of Washington Press. Perhaps inspired by European design or not? but I cannot believe that people who make such splendid articulated masks would have problems arriving at a form of bellows.

I would think that this would have less to do with available technology and more that it might be a real bitch to dig clay out of the perma-frost. They were carvers and weavers based on available resources. ;) :)

Hi Tim,

I agree that once you point out the problem and solution, they would be fully capable of understanding. However, there are a bunch of lessons that you have to learn to work iron, including:

1. Rocks melt/ become flexible with heat. They knew that heat-treating chert and other stones made them more workable for knapping, but the idea that things become more flexible with heat is more applicable to wood than stone.
2. That it's useful to make super-hot fires. This is the pottery lesson.
3. That charcoal is useful for making super-hot fires.
4. That copper can be melted in super-hot fires.
5. That bellows, blow-tubes, or other gizmos help make fires hotter--I'm sure they knew about blowing on flames, but that sustained air flow thing is tricky.
6. That furnaces help make really hot fires.
7. (The trickier part) that if you heat up ocher or other iron ore in a charcoal furnace with a draft, you get this stuff that, if you pound it repeatedly under heat in the proper fashion, turns out to be really useful--iron.

That's a lot to learn from scratch. I think it was easier in Eurasia and Africa because there was so much trade in ideas going around that one tribe didn't have to make all of the discoveries in order to make iron. They could borrow or steal from others.

Now, assuming you don't know about iron or even melting and molding copper. How do you know that there's something called iron that's out there and worth having, let alone discover all those steps and put them together? However, once you've seen iron and steel, it's not hard to learn how to make it.

F

PURE GOLD, PURE SILVER AS WELL AS PURE COPPER NUGETS CAN BE FOUND IN RIVERS AND STREAMS OR DUG FROM ROCKS IN SEVERAL AREAS OF THE AMERICAS. CONSIDERING THE METAL WORK THAT WAS DONE IN PRECOLUMBIAN AMERICA NORTH AND SOUTH WHICH IS OBVIOUS IN THE MANY ARTEFACTS FOUND IN MUSEUMS MANY OF WHICH WERE DUG BY ARCHEOLOGISTS THERE CAN BE NO DOUBT THAT METAL WORK WAS DONE OVER A LONG PERIOD AND OVER A LARGE AREA.THE LARGER CIVILIZATIONS (SUCH AS THE MOUND BUILDERS, AZTECK, INCA, MAYA) NO DOUBT SENT OUT PARTYS TO EXPLORE AND TRADE OVER LARGE AREAS IN ANCIENT TIMES SO THEIR TECKNOLOGY WOULD HAVE SPREAD.
THERE ARE ARTEFACTS IN GOLD, SILVER,COPPER AND BRONZE SO PERHAPS THERE WAS RUDIMENTRY IRON WORKING BUT IRON UNLIKE THE ABOVE METALS IS SELDOM FOUND IN NUGGET OR LARGE LUMPS EXCEPT IN METEORITES. THAT WOULD HAVE MADE IT MORE DIFFICULT TO REFINE THAN THE OTHERS PLUS THE HIGHER HEAT REQUIRED SO PERHAPS IF ANY ARTEFACTS WERE MADE OF IT THEY WOULD HAVE BEEN SMALL PERHAPS AMULETS AND NO DOUBT WOULD HAVE RUSTED AWAY. I AM SURE IF ANY OF THE METAL WORKERS OF THE DAY CAME ACROSS IRON THEY WOULD HAVE EXPERIMENTED WITH IT AS THEY DID WITH OTHER METALS.
I WONDER IF ANY ARCHEOLOGICAL DIGGS HAVE FOUND RUST IN ANY OF THE BURIALS THAT HAVE BEEN EXCAVATED?

I AGREE THE IRON OR STEEL KNIVES THAT STARTED THIS THREAD ARE MORE LIKELY AFTER CONTACT WAS MADE, WHICH CAN COVER QUITE A LONG PERIOD AND DIFFERENT POSSIBILITYS AS TO WHO VISITED THE AMERICAS BEFORE COLUMBUS. CHINESE, AFRICANS,PHONECIANS,VIKINGS, EGYPTIANS AMONG OTHER POSSIBILITYS. :D

JUST MY 2 CENTS WORTH

If we can count on oral tradition at all (and granted, it can be questionable at times) the "Killer Whale" dagger i posted in post #14 goes back 10 generations. If we count a generation as 20 yrs. that would place it's origins in the very beginning of the 1800's. If we look at the very competent crafting of this blade though, it is clear that the Tlingit did not learn to forge like this over night, so i think we need to look just a bit further back than that date for the introduction of this art form to the tribes.
I agree with Barry that we don't necessarily need to link this to the first European encounters. Chinese or other Asian explorers may well have made the voyage (or trek) across the Bering Strait years before the English or even the Russians arrived, though if the 1741 date for Russian encounters is correct blades like this may well have been made before the end of the 18th century. :shrug: :)

WE ALL HAVE TO GO WITH RECORDED HISTORY WHICH IS A FAIRLY RECENT THING AND MUCH OF THE FIRST RECORDED HISTORY WAS LOST DUE TO NATURAL DISASTERS,WAR, THEFT AND THE INTOLERANTANCE OF ONE CULTURE FOR ANOTHERS HISTORY OR BELIEFS. TODAY HISTORY IS CONSTANTLY BEING REWRITTEN, MANY TIMES TO EXPRESS THE VIEWS OF THE WRITER OR GROUP REGARDLESS OF ITS ACCURACY AND OFTEN JUST PROPAGANDA OR OUTRIGHT LIES.
THERE ARE JUST TOO MANY UNKNOWNS TO BE ABLE TO STATE ANYTHING IS ABSOLUTELY CORRECT IN PREHISTORY AND OFTEN IN RECORDED HISTORY. MUCH KNOWLEGE HAS BEEN LOST IN MODERN TIMES WITHOUT MAJOR DISASTERS SUCH AS THE COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATION. FOR EXAMPLE CAN ANYONE MAKE A STRADIVARIUS VIOLIN TODAY, THE ANSWER IS NO BUT THEY ARE WORKING ON IT.
A BIT OFF TOPIC BUT HERE IN OKLAHOMA WE HAVE MANY MARKEINGS ON VARIOUS ROCKS SOME APPEAR TO BE ANCIENT NORSE,PHONECIAN, EGYPTIAN AS WELL AS OTHERS FAKE OR NOT??? BUT THE HUMAN RACE HAS ALWAYS BEEN PRONE TO WANDER OR GET THEMSELVES INTO TROUBLE SO THAT SOME PEOPLE CAME HERE BEFORE COLUNBUS IS LIKELY THRU DESIGN OR DISASTER?? THE POLYNESIAN RACES CERTAINLY PLAYED A PART IN SETTELING THIS CONTENENT. THE COASTS OF THE AMERICAS ARE MUCH MORE EASILY ACCESIBLE THAN THE INTERIOR IN OKLAHOMA SO IF ANCIENT VISITORS POSSIBLY MADE IT HERE THEY WERE MOST CERTIANLY ON THE COASTS. :shrug:

Hi David,

While I agree that one does not learn to forge good blades over night, I do think that every good smith learns to forge good blades within his working lifetime, or a decade or two. Given that window, I'm not surprised that the Tlingit were making good blades early on.

As another example, think of the plains Indians. They went from a culture that had never seen a horse to being some of the best horsemen in the world in a generation or two. Change can happen quite rapidly, even in traditional cultures.

F

ummm, yes Fearn, i think we agree. That's why i wrote:
:)

It is clear reaching the required heat could not of been a problem. To extract "float copper" if it was only this copper, and then melt it into a workable amount, indeed to work the copper as many of the copper artifacts are large.

Smelting was undoubtably known of in parts of South America, the Andes for instance. Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin. Tin is only found as an ore. You can have a copper/lead bronze, lead can be found naturally but is extemely rare so that to would be from an ore. You could have copper/silver but that is billon and different to bronze.

The B, Columbia site has record of an iron knife from 1780?

Could possible smelting and working iron be found in corners like the Andean bronze. The materials are there. Look at these beautiful metal art objects from "Ancient Arts of the Andes" the Museum of Modern Art.

Hi David,

You're right. I think it's a case where I read what you wrote in a different way than you intended it.

Hi Tim,

So far as I know (and I have done some reading), the people of the Andes were casting bronze around 1000 AD. They used arsenic-bronze for some weapons, but metal weapons were not apparently widespread.

As for why the Andeans didn't discover iron even though the area was civilized for CA 5000 years before Columbus, that's one of the bigger puzzles of Andean archeology, and yes, they've been looking. Most of the prerequisite steps were already present by 1000 AD. My guess as a non-expert was that it came from a variety of possible reasons. Here's my list (and remember, I'm not an expert, just someone who's read a bit of the literature):

1. There *might* be some weirdness about smelting iron at high altitude. I've never seen anyone talk about this, but if one of our smiths would comment?
2. Metal tools didn't play an significant role in the Andes until around 1000 AD. They did some fairly amazing things with agriculture, animal husbandry, textiles, and the like (and in fact, we're still rediscovering some of their tricks). However, metal was first (and primarily) used for ornaments, then as an adjunct for stoneworking, and then (finally) for weapons. Odd as it may seem to us, metal was less important to them as a working material.
3. The Andes are wracked by these periodic "mega El Ninos" which last for decades and tend to kill off civilizations (to clarify, many of the people survive, but the centralized city states disappear during or after these drought-and-flood episodes). This seems to have imposed a roughly 500 year cycle on the region, where the survivors of the previous mega-Nino regrouped and formed a new civilization that built new cities under a pleasant climate, only to get wiped out again in the next mega-Nino. Similar disasters hit Europe and Asia, but for whatever reason, the Andes were more prone to them. This seems to have delayed the development of metallurgy, just as it seems to have spurred development of terracing, canals, and other technologies designed to keep people fed during these catastrophes. Seems sensible, actually.
4. This may sound weird to us, but their major weapons were stone, not metal. They used things like slings, which everybody had, which could be made to spec in a few hours out of readily available material (or a day or two for a really fancy one), which had ammunition literally lying around, and which out-ranged the local bows. When you've got that kind of weapons technology available to everyone, do you really need metal weapons?
The metal mace-heads I've seen were apparently status symbols as much as improved weapons.

Those are my guesses. I suspect that, had the Andeans survived uncontacted for another 1000 years, they would have figured out iron metallurgy. Still, there's no evidence they worked iron.

F

I'm no smith yet (trying though) but as I understand it, high altitude is only a problem when you're dealing with athmospheric/venturi gas burners which require a certain athmospheric pressure to ensure an adequate fuel mix.

The rareified athmosphere could perhaps pose a problem to combustion, but only at very high altitudes. Assuming a simple forge with hide bellows, I don't think people would have problem smelting at high altitudes. Material availability is of greater concern I think. Mining ore in a low-oxygen environment sounds particualrly difficult.

Then again, why talk of high altitudes? How many urban/production centres were high up in the mountains (Machu Pichu, yes, but others?). Very many cities were far lower down, despite being in the Andes.

Thoughts...
Emanuel

Hi Manolo,

Most of the good land (and most of the population) in the central Andes is between 10,000 and 50,000 ft (crudely, 3300 and 5000 m). Most of the modern, low elevation cities were founded by Spaniards, in part because they couldn't tolerate the high elevations, especially women trying to have children. At low elevations on the Pacific coast, there isn't a lot of water outside the tropics, so arable land and townsites are fairly limited.

That's why I was asking about high altitude smithing. It's one of those things no one talks about, and I don't know whether it's because it's a non-issue, or because so few blacksmiths work at high elevation that it's not really thought about. Otherwise, iron ore is fairly plentiful in the Andes, so raw material wasn't an issue.

F

I am just fascinated by the hole thing of metalwork in the Americas. Relics are there to show that it was pan American. Could the PNW have been the first to produce iron? Archeaologists suggest that the ancient British bronze age and iron ages were not seperate events. It seems obvious that a merging would occur. Stone, bronze and iron being used for a period of time while wealth, location, materials and trade made certian materials obsolete. A lot may have depended on the job and size of the tool.

Hi Tim,

The only archeologically supported iron working in the Americas prior to 1491 (and ignoring the Norse!) was the iron used by the Greenland eskimos from the Cape York meteorite, going back ~1000 years. That was essentially modified stone-working, not forging. I suspect the material was traded fairly widely in the Arctic, simply because they traded chert and other tool stones as well. Otherwise, blacksmithing was brought in by the Europeans.

I don't know of any evidence for any North American bronze smithing, either. Most of the metal work seems to have been confined to the Andes, with gold working reaching up into Mexico (the Aztecs).

Best,

F