Miskwabik’s Journey beyond Minong: Copper Production Systems among Hunger-Gatherers in the Northern Lake Superior Basin 4,000–6,000 Years Ago

Summary

This is an abstract from the "From Hard Rock to Heavy Metal: Metal Tool Production and Use by Indigenous Hunter-Gatherers in North America" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Over the past 10,000 years, hunter-gathers in the Lake Superior Basin have utilized primary and secondary deposits of native (elemental) copper in a production and exchange network that spanned across and beyond the North American Midcontinent. The production system that comprises the core of North America’s Native Copper Industry is a system of continuous technological innovation whose size and antiquity supersedes other metal industries of similar antiquity around the globe. This paper will examine the organization of the copper production system in the northern Lake Superior Basin through the systematic research of copper production stages on sites across this region. This examination will detail the life history of the copper production process to demonstrate the technological innovations that allowed this industry to flourish. By understanding the step-by-step process of copper production among hunter-gathers, a different discussion emerges on the complexity of metallurgy in the Lake Superior Basin over the past 10,000 years. This research pushes the current paradigm for understanding indigenous copper working in North America as a complex metallurgical industry that existed on a continental scale. Conceptualizing hunter-gatherer use of metals as an industry provides an important starting place to better understand one of the world’s oldest metallurgical systems.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• From Hard Rock to Heavy Metal: Metal Tool Production and Use by Indigenous Hunter-Gatherers in North America   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36535.0