Differential use of copper in northern and southern Wisconsin socieities

Summary

Avocational collectors in Wisconsin have collected thousands of copper artifacts over the last century and half. This copper has gone largely unexamined by the professional archaeological community. The archaeological literature is therefore silent on basic facts such as size ranges and changes in use of the raw material from society to society. Copper entered the economic systems of these Archaic Wisconsin societies as an innovative, but ultimately redundant raw material given the existence of bone and stone artifacts of apparently equivalent use-value. It is expected that copper as a raw material fundamentally changed the cultural systems of its adoptive societies and that its use will vary relative to its accessibility. This study reports in-progress results from a large copper collection from both Lake Koshkonong in southeast Wisconsin and the Lake Nokomis and Pembine areas in Northern Wisconsin. The use of copper as a raw material will be compared between northern and southern Wisconsin locales using metric, morphological, and use wear data from the three source areas.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage