A Possible Beadmaker's Kit from North America's Lake Superior Copper District

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers Volume 6 Article 6 1-1-1994 A Possible Beadmaker's Kit from North America's Lake Superior Copper District Susan R. Martin Follow this and additional works at: http://surface.syr.edu/beads Part of the Archaeological Anthropology Commons, History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons, Science and Technology Studies Commons, and the Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons Repository Citation Martin, Susan R. (1994). "A Possible Beadmaker's Kit from North America's Lake Superior Copper District." BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers 6: 49-60. Available at: http://surface.syr.edu/beads/vol6/iss1/6 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact . A POSSIBLE BEA:PMAKER'S KIT FROM NORTH AMERICA'S LAKE SUPERIOR COPPER DISTRICT Sus an R. Martin Beads of copper are amongst the oldest and most widespread ornaments known in North America. Native copper was an important material to prehistoric Americans, and certainly the most important metal. It was collected, transported and traded over wide areas as early as 7000 years before present, and its use for ornaments persisted until it was gradually replaced by European metals over the many years of the contact period. A recently discovered cache of copper beads, bead preforms, awls, a crescent knife and scraps of raw copper at site 20KE20 in northern Michigan offers insight into the process of copper-bead production in 5th-century North America. INTRODUCTION The use of native-copper beads as ornamentation was probably one of the most widespread and long-lived traditions in prehistoric eastern North America. The most plentiful source of native copper (i.e., relatively pure elemental copper) in the world is the Lake Superior basin of interior North America (Fig. 1) where it is found both in ancient volcanic lodes and as a constituent of Pleistocene-age glacially transported river and stream gravels. Native people of the region made use of the material as early as 7000 years B.P. (Beukens et al. 1992; Martin 1993). It was mined, gathered and used for various tools such as awls, spear points, knives and adzes, as well as for ornamental and · symbolic objects such as beads, bracelets, ear spools, tinkling cones and, occasionally, engraved and embossed breastplates, musical instruments and headdresses. The distribution of the oldest copper artifacts is basically the same as the spatial distribution of the glacial drift within which the raw copper is often BEADS 6:49-60 (1994) found. In addition, there is some evidence that the material was traded far to the east and south of its most-abundant Great Lakes source in very early times. Other copper sources are known from Nova Scotia, New Jersey, the Appalachians and the American Southwest (Rapp et al. 1990), and there is growing evidence that copper was mined and gathered in these areas by aboriginals, particularly in the last thousand years (Childs 1994; Goad 1978). Copper implements are somehow entrancing to many North American prehistorians. Students of technology and aesthetics find it fascinating that the material was used routinely for many thousands of years with · strai.ghtforward techn.o logies of processing, largely cold-hammering and annealing, a continuum with ancient stoneworking technologies. No one in eastern North America resorted to smelting the metal; there was no real need to because the material was nearly pure copper. It was ·shaped by hammering and annealing. The results include some of the most compelling, beautiful artistry known from North American prehistory (Halsey 1983). Students of symbolic behavior find copper implements of particular interest because some aboriginal cultures charged them with special cosmological and symbolic properties. Copper objects were thought to contain the powers of good medicine, wealth and well-being. Copper is also sometimes found in important social contexts such as burials and ritual cremations (Greber and Ruhl 1989; Hruska 1967). Copper objects were widely sought, and trading ornaments and talismans of copper became a standard feature of prehistoric life far afield from the Upper Great Lakes and other sources (Brose 1994). 50 \. .:., ... ~: \...........,., .............. ..................... 100 0 .............., ...... ........... _._·-............ Kilometers Figure 1. Location of selected native copper deposits in the Lake Superior district, United States/Canada border region (drawing by Patrick E. Martin). A BEADMAKER'S KIT UNCOVERED Concentrated deposits of copper artifacts and raw nuggets, colloquially referred to as caches, are occasionally discovered and reported. This is particularly common in the northeastern United States and adjacent areas of Canada, and is of particular interest because it is assumed that the practice of caching is intentional or, as Leader (1988:72-73) puts it, the caches "represent ordered behavior" and may include "some form of processing tool kit." The caching of copper for future recovery seems to have been a common pattern of behavior through long reaches of prehistoric time (Binford 1961; Griffin and Quimby 1961; Halsey . 1983; Leader 1988; Martin 1993; Popham and Emerson 1954). This is the depositional context of the copper artifacts described in this paper: a pouch of copper beads and bead preforms in various stages of the production process buried in a sandy ridge about 15 centuries ago. 51 In 1987, an amateur artifact collector, prospecting with a metal detector on a wooded relict beach ridge adjacent to an outcrop of native copper in Keweenaw County, Michigan, discovered the · cache of copper artifacts. He very hastily collected the cache, making no use of modern excavation procedures. Later, and somewhat reluctantly, he enlisted the help of professional archaeologists at Michigan Technological University for description and analysis. The cache was a great find because it included preserved textiles and leather associated with copper artifacts. Many isolated copper artifacts have been discovered at the site as well; typologically, the range of the recovered tool types suggests a long period of occupancy and use (Martin 1993). Limited rescue excavations were conducted at the site (20KE20) in the summer of 1988, by the Archaeology Laboratory of Michigan Technological University (MTU), with the financial support of MTU, the Michigan Bureau of History and the National Geographic Society. A series of radiocarbon dates and their consistency with what appear to be sequent beach features suggests that copper use and fabrication at 20KE20 went on over a substantial · period of prehistoric time, perhaps the range of 7800-1500 years B.P. (Martin 1993:175). The cache allows us to better understand prehistoric beadmaking a (...truncated)