Inuit Iron

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   Inuits are a people that conquered the artic lands from Alaska to Greenland. Experts say they came recently to the Americas, perhaps 2 thousand years ago only, so they carried a culture that is different from their southern Native Americans neighbours.

One of the curious things on the Inuits is that they carry some exceptional elements in its culture unknown for the rest of the Americas. For instance, they knew the arch in the building of theirs iglus, they knew the rotating drill, the harpoon and the iron.

This is the evidence of iron manufacturing between the Inuits.

Fragment from : http://www.taiga.net/yourYukon/col168.html

In 1918, an early Arctic explorer was astounded to find some Inuit people using knife blades, harpoon points and engraving tools made from meteoric iron, as it was assumed that northern peoples had no access to metal. In fact they had been making tools from nickel and iron for centuries. Their source was a large meteorite that landed on an island off of northern Greenland about 10,000 years ago.
Various expeditions searched for the source of the metals, but it was not found until 1894 that Robert E. Peary was led to the site called "Iron Mountain" on an island off of northern Greenland. The Inuit called the three huge chunks of meteorite there the Tent or "Ahnighito," the Woman and the Dog.
Peary spent the next three summers hauling the meteorites to the coast where they could be loaded on ships; even building a railway to cover part of the distance. Once in New York, the meteorites eventually were sold to the American Museum of Natural History. Ahnighito, which weighs 34 tons, remains the largest meteor on display in the world.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteorite

Indigenous peoples often prized iron-nickel meteorites as an easy, if limited, source of iron metal. For example, the Inuit used chips of the Cape York meteorite to form cutting edges for tools and spear tips.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_York_meteorite

Cape York meteorite

The Cape York meteorite, which collided with Earth nearly 10,000 years ago, is named for Cape York, the location of its discovery in Greenland, and is one of the largest iron meteorites in the world. It was primarily made up of iron and nickel metals and weighs approximately 30.875 t, and was one of several other masses in its fall. The masses were known to the Inuit as Ahnighito (the Tent), weighing ~31 tons, the Woman (2� tons), and the Dog (� ton). For centuries, Inuit living near it used it as a source of metal for tools and harpoons.
The first rumors of its existence reached scientific circles in 1818. Five expeditions between 1818 and 1883 failed to find the source of the iron. It was located in 1894 by Robert Peary, the famous Arctic explorer, who had enlisted the help of a local guide who brought him to Saviksoah Island off northern Greenland's Cape York in 1894.
It took Peary three years to manage to load the pieces onto ships and required the building of Greenland's only railway.
He sold the pieces for $40,000 to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City where they still stand (2007). The 3.4 m x 2.1 m x 1.7 m Ahnighito is now on display in the Arthur Ross Hall. The mass is so heavy that it was necessary to build its stand such that its supports reached through directly to the bedrock below the museum.
In 1963, the fourth major piece of the Cape York meteorite was discovered by Vagn F. Buchwald near Agpalilik. The Agpalilik meteorite, also known as the Man, weighs around 20 tons and currently resides in the Geological Museum of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Other smaller pieces have also been found, such as the 3 ton Savik I meteorite in 1911, the 48 kg Thule meteorite in 1955, the 7.8 kg Savik II in 1961, and the 250 kg Tunorput fragment in 1984.
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From:
T. A. Rickard (1941). "The Use of Meteoric Iron". The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 71 

In this page it is read that Aztecs and Chilean natives also had metheoritic iron!

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0307-3114%281941%2971%3A1%2F2%3C55%3ATUOMI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-8&size=LARGE&origin=JSTOR-enlargePage

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Recovering Cape York Meteor

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Cape York Meteor for sale

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Inuit Iron blades

http://www.civilization.ca/cmc/archeo/cvh/neuf/v67-30.htm

Whaling and Sealing Harpoons of the Labrador Inuit.  
The large harpoon on the right dates from the historic period. It is made from two large pieces of whale bone held together with iron rivets. The iron end blade was fashioned by an Inuit from a saw blade or another piece of flat metal. In the upper left is a similar end blade, although it is made from polished slate and dates from the prehistoric period. In the lower left are a sealing harpoon with an iron end blade and a slate end blade from the prehistoric period. The regular hunting of large whales with weapons such as these is one of the traits distinguishing the Inuit of Labrador, as well as their prehistoric ancestors, from the early Palaeo-Eskimo people. 
Courtesy: Newfoundland Museum   

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Pinguin

Inuit Iron

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Fiction: American Indian people were living in Stone Age culture at the time of conquest.

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