Testing Adaptive Efficiency: A Comparison of the Durability of Stone and Copper Projectile Points

Summary

The Old Copper Complex represents a unique temporally and geographically bounded technological phenomenon. Binford (1962) challenged the idea that copper tools were adopted by Native Americans solely because they were technologically more efficient. He argued that Archaic copper served a primarily socio-technic function based on two assumptions. One, that copper tools were more efficient in use performance than their stone and bone counterparts. And two, that the energy expenditure required for raw material acquisition and production of copper tools was much greater than that for other material types. This socio-technic designation has formed the baseline for interpretations of the Old Copper Complex for the past 60 years. However, no one has tested these underlying assumptions about the relative economic efficiency of stone and copper tools. This study documents the experimental production and use of copper and chipped stone projectile points in order to test these assumptions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21747