The Look Back

Indigenous Copper Technology in the Western Great Lakes

Kacie Lucchini Butcher: What if I told you that one of the oldest metalworking traditions in the world was in the area that’s now Wisconsin?

Long before Europeans arrived, Native peoples in the western Great Lakes region had been making their own metal tools and objects for thousands of years.

Taylor Bailey: To learn more, we talked with anthropologists and Native historians.

We found out that the story of copper in Wisconsin goes way deeper than we ever imagined.

Our journey started at UW-Madison’s anthropology collection. They’ve got a whole assortment of ancient copper artifacts. And because it’s a teaching collection, we even got to touch some of these objects. How cool is that?

[upbeat music]

Kacie: I hope this isn’t a stupid question, but what is copper?

Katherine Trotter: Copper is a metal. It’s a very soft one. It’s not quite as soft as gold, but it’s a lot softer than things like iron or bronze or brass. And it’s very malleable, easy to work. It is usually this kind of orangey, like, metallic color. Copper that oxidized develops a green film, kind of like copper’s version of rusting. But it’s still very much copper when it’s green.

Taylor: So, what are the some of the most common things that people make with copper?

Sissel Schroeder: Here in Wisconsin and what’s now Michigan, the earliest objects that were made out of copper were tools. So, things like projectile points. So, this, or knives. So, this would have been hafted on to a wooden shaft and could be used for cutting, might be used as a spear. There were woodworking tools. There were cutting tools.

And then, after several thousand years, it transitioned to mostly personal ornamentation or objects of some sort of ritual significance.

Kacie: Native peoples in the area that’s now northern Wisconsin started working copper nearly 10,000 years ago. But where did all this copper come from?

Tens of thousands of years ago, much of Wisconsin had been covered by a huge glacier for millennia.

About 11,000 years ago, this ice sheet started to recede. As the glacier slowly scraped across the region, it exposed and deposited copper that had been formed in the Earth’s crust about a billion years ago.

Soon after the glacier disappeared, the first people began to arrive in the area. As they did so, they would have noticed copper that was basically scattered across the landscape, literally just on the ground for the taking in some places.

Because this copper was so pure and abundant, it would have been relatively easy to start working it into things like spear points, knives, and all sorts of tools.

Sissel: This is a copper needle or pin. It’s about 1,000 years old, and it still is sharp. And we found this in association or right next to a sandstone tablet that appeared to have red pigment on it.

So, we think, one of our hypotheses about this object is that this was used for tattooing.

Kacie: Oh, that’s so cool!

Sissel: Isn’t it cool?

Kacie: Yeah, that is so cool.

Taylor: So, where was this found? Where was the archaeological site?

Sissel: So, this is from a site called Aztalan, which is outside of Lake Mills, Wisconsin.

Taylor: A lot of these artifacts are thousands of years old. Do we know anything about the people who used them or where they came from?

Sissel: All Indigenous peoples in the Americas, the ancestors of today’s Native Americans who made and worked copper in this region. And they did that over thousands of years.

Taylor: Our journey continued up to northern Wisconsin, where we talked with a Tribal Historic Preservation Officer of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. He showed us a copper tool that was found in their ancestral homeland.

Marvin Defoe: So, this one here is a copper implement that we found. It’s a little point, and you could tell that that it was worked. See, like a point. Used for a hunting.

This one here, we found here in Red Cliff with a project we were doing, and it was dated 5,000 years ago.

Kacie: When people find copper, how does it go from, you know, looking either like this or like that rockish-looking one to something beautiful like this or to something more ornamental?

Katherine: The way copper was worked is you get a piece of copper. You would start hitting it with a rock on something relatively flat, like a rock that you could use as an anvil, like blacksmiths use. And then you would keep hitting it.

Soft copper, the more you hit it, the more it will, like, expand out. When it starts getting too hard because you’ve been hitting it too much, it will stop expanding out, or it will even start cracking in areas. So, what you have to do then is you have to put it in a fire and do a process called annealing, which is where you heat metal up really, really hot. And you have to heat copper up to red hot and keep it in there for a little while, and it will get soft again and you can start hammering it again.

And you keep repeating that process until you get things like this. This is a little knife I made using these processes.

Kacie: Indigenous people in the Great Lakes region used copper for thousands of years. But around 3,000 years ago, they mostly switched from making tools to making things that were decorative or ceremonial, like jewelry.

It’s hard to know what exactly drove this change. Some experimental archaeologists have argued that it might have been due to the amount of time needed to make copper tools, much more time than it takes to make something out of stone. And the end result isn’t necessarily better. It turns out that stone can be just as sharp as copper, and sometimes even sharper.

Changes in the environment may have also played a role. When the glacier receded around 11,000 years ago, the landscape that emerged was extremely abundant. This started changing around 5,000 years ago, and hunting and foraging may have taken more effort. Maybe the increased time spent gathering food and resources left less time for things like making copper tools, especially if stone tools were just as good.

Kacie: When you’re presented these objects or when archaeologists find them, how do you figure out what these things were used for?

Sissel: That’s a complicated question. And there’s a lot of different things that we might do. One is experimental work. So, making replicas of the artifacts, and then using those replicas for the different tasks that we think something might have been used for.

Taylor: There are lots of ways that researchers might try and figure out what an object was used for. Experimental archaeology is just one example.

Researchers might also look for signs of wear that can give clues to an artifact’s purpose, or they might compare ancient tools to modern ones.

Another research approach involves working with Native people who preserve Indigenous traditions and practices. In many instances, materials found in historical research or archaeological digs can complement the knowledge that Indigenous community members have passed down for generations.

Edith Leoso: My way of looking at it is everything you need to know about the place is in its original name.

You know, working with anthropologists, archaeologists, we went to a particular location and he wanted to do an archaeological excavation. Said, “Well, we need to know what they did here.” And I said, “Okay, but the name of the lake is Nebagamon.” “On” at the end is a locative, it’s a place. “Nebag” is to sleep. This is the place to sleep. So, what was it? The location he was digging up, he was finding all kinds of things. And he said, “There’s a fireplace here and there’s the fireplace here!” Like, yeah, you’re gonna find all kinds of fireplaces here because this is the place to sleep. And you’re gonna light a fire to stay warm.

Marvin: It’s kind of like taking science and humanity, and you put that together, working together, and it kind of helps putting the puzzle together. Utilizing science and also utilizing our stories in our oral tradition.

Kacie: Copper working in the area that is now Wisconsin and Michigan is some of the oldest in the world. This copper history is part of the rich heritage of the Native peoples who’ve lived in this area for thousands of years. But this story is still being uncovered. There is a lot we don’t know.

Taylor: By working with Native peoples and considering all sorts of evidence, we can shed more light on this underappreciated part of the region’s history. Are you curious to learn more? Maybe you’ll help do this research.

Katherine: It’s also really pretty and shiny. So, part of the reason it was used for personal ornaments and, like, ceremonial objects is because how shiny it is.

Kacie: I mean, it is fun to also know that people in the past just also liked things ’cause they were beautiful, [both laugh] ‘Cause I also like shiny things.