Abstract
Most prehistoric societies that experimented with copper as a tool raw material eventually abandoned stone as their primary medium for tool making. However, after thousands of years of experimentation with this metal, North American hunter-gatherers abandoned it and returned to the exclusive use of stone. Why? We experimentally confirmed that replica copper tools are inferior to stone ones when each is sourced in the same manner as their archaeological counterparts and subjected to identical tasks. Why, then, did copper consistently lead to more advanced metallurgy in most other areas of the world? We suggest that it was the unusual level of purity in the North American copper sourced by North American groups, and that naturally occurring alloys yielded sufficiently superior tools to encourage entry into the copper-bronze-iron continuum of tool manufacture in other parts of the world.
Highlights
Metallurgy in North America may have begun as early as 7,000 years ago[1,2]
Why would people select against what is widely perceived to be a ‘superior’ raw material – metal – and revert back to a seemingly ‘inferior’ one – stone? Yet, by 3000 B.P., Late Archaic foraging societies of the North American Upper Great Lakes transitioned away from the utilitarian copper tools they had been using for millennia[1,13,14,15,16,17]
Our results demonstrated that North American copper knives are more durable than analogous ones made from stone, supporting Binford’s19 assumption
Summary
By the Middle and Late Archaic periods between 6000 and 3000 B.P. a florescence of copper working, known as the Old Copper Culture, thrived in and around the world’s largest naturally occurring pure copper deposit which is in North America’s Lake Superior region[3] During these millennia, hunter-gatherers stretching from central Canada to the eastern Great Lakes regularly made utilitarian implements out of copper[4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12], only for these items to decline in prominence and frequency as populations grew and social complexity increased during the Archaic to Woodland Transition[1,13,14,15,16,17]. It has been argued that an increasingly socially complex world required an increase in ornamental copper production, resulting in a concomitant production decline in utilitarian copper tools[14,15,16,17,18,27]
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