Today, a story of wood, copper and iron. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Our minds teem with images
of intellectual and physical grandeur in ancient
Egypt and Greece. What was going on at the same
time in Northern Europe? Let's pick that question
up at the end of the Stone
Age. A little before 3000 BC Egypt began using
copper and (at the same time) took up the first hieroglyphic writing.
Stone Age technologies lingered longer in Europe,
even though copper appeared in the North as early
as it did in Egypt. The famous
Iceman of the Örtztaler Alps was
recently found, preserved since 3300 BC in
high-altitude ice. His axe had a wooden handle, but
it also had a fine copper head. The copper wasn't
mixed with tin to make bronze, but then neither
were the first Egyptian coppers. Both Egyptians and
Europeans began finding natural bronzes around 2000
BC. Natural bronze turned up in both wealthy
English burial sites and in Egypt about that same
time.
But Europe remained primarily a land of wood. Her
buildings were far less grand than the pyramids,
but European lake-dwellers did develop a rich
economy of wooden houses, fine pottery, and
articulate tools of stone and wood. Even after the
Great Pyramid, the largest buildings made for human
occupancy were still European long-houses. In 2000
BC, a typical 130-foot long-house near present-day
Cologne served people, cattle, and utility
functions.
I saw how that worked when I visited my
great-grandmother's old home in Austria. It was
also a long-house, but bent in four right-angle
turns to form a square around an open courtyard. It
still housed all the farm functions under one roof.
You could walk from the parlor to the barn without
going outside. Manure, stacked in that courtyard,
gave off heat to the house around it as it
decomposed and turned into fertilizer.
By 1500 BC kilns were hot enough to let people mix
their own hard bronze alloys. And around 1100 BC,
temperatures had become high enough to separate
iron from its ore as well. Iron use was widespread
in the Eastern Mediterranean area by 1000 BC. Soon
after that, ironworks appeared all over Central
Europe. An early Iron Age Polish village, now
excavated and rebuilt, has wooden walls, wooden
watch towers, and streets paved with logs, but only
a little iron -- and that tells us much about
Europe and metals.
Ancient Europe was far more than the wilderness
outback we imagine -- more than just a forest
overrun by nomadic barbarians. Yet it produced none
of the science, and little of the advanced
technology, of Egypt and Greece. That Polish town,
with its minimal use of metals, relied on the
wealth of surrounding wood. Poverty of means often
elicits a wealth of invention, and Egypt was poor
in wood. When I look at early northern Europe, I
see a people with all the ready building material
they could use -- a people whose development was
rendered static for a long time, by so much wood.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
Bahn, P. G., 100 Great Archaeological
Discoveries. New York; Barnes & Noble books,
1995.
Singer, C., Holmyard, E.J., and Hall, A.R., A
History of Technology. Vol. I, New York: Oxford
University Press, 1954, Chapter 21.
