How did ancient civilizations make furnaces hot enough to melt metals like copper or iron with just charcoal, wood, coal, clay, dirt and stone?
In: Engineering
Especially with copper and tin, you don’t need to get it super hot, relatively speaking, in order to melt it. Pile up some dirt and stone to make a cylinder, put some wood inside the furnace you just made, dump your copper and tin inside to cook, and then put a pot of water on top for a bit of tea (optional).
A regular cooking oven used to bake bread gets to 400f. Copper needs about 2000f to melt- hotter than your bread oven but, relatively speaking, not super super hot.
Iron is significantly harder than copper, needing about 2800f to melt – almost 50% hotter – but once people had been making bronze for a while, iron was basically the same principles at work.
Regular wood fires, without any special effort, can get as hot as about 2750f, give or take a bit. So copper is well within the range of “Just throw more wood on it,” while iron is -just barely- at the top end of the range of what a wood fire can melt.
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