At school I was taught that the Native Americans used stone tools, and lived as hunter-gatherer groups roaming across America, living in crude tents or makeshift huts. They had learned how to make pottery and rudimentary weaving, but that was all. The advanced Mesoamerican civilzations, and the Incas of South America had a more developed culture, led by kings, they build cities with magnificent stone buildings, pyramids, and carved stone. They had armies, agriculture, irrigation, delicate weaving and some metallurgical skills. They worked gold and silver by beating the metals, and also had some rudimentary smelting know-how for copper and bronze. They never learned about iron.
But this history overlooked the fact that some native groups in North America developed the use of native copper metal, and over thousands of years, these people moved from utilitarian objects (adzes, knives) to delicately decorated artifacts for ceremonial purposes. The "Indians" weren't so brutal and uncivilized as I had been taught.
The Old Copper Complex
The Old Copper Complex, or Culture appeared in the Great Lakes region of the U.S. around 6,000 years ago, during a period known as the Middle Archaic. At that time, they worked native copper (pure copper metal) into utilitarian objects like axes, knives, hooks for fishing, and spear or arrow heads (see photos of tools online: Milwaukee Museum Collection). They continued to do so for thousands of years, developing techniques to extract the almost pure copper metal nuggets from the soil and bedrock.
Roughly 2500 years ago, their culture shifted, and these people started making decorative (probably religious) artifacts and jewelry. (Source).
Thousands of objects have been discovered and are held in private and public collections. Many more were looted and melted down by the newcomer Europeans after the discovery of America.
As mentioned in previous posts, the American scholars of the 1800s didn't believe that the "Indians" were capable of working metals, or crafting the objects that they were finding in mounds and burials. They believed, with their racist mindset, that the natives were far too primitive to have developed this type of material culture. The scientists imagined a lost civilization of advanced mound-builders, or that advanced people from Eurasia (Phoenicians, Egyptians, Romans, Vikings, etc.) made their way across the Mediterranean Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean, and upstream along the St. Lawrence River, deep into the Great Lakes, to source copper and in the process, teach the natives how to work the metal. Clearly absurd considering the logistics involved, and the nature of their ships. It was fine to bring tin from Cornwall, in the southwestern tip of Britain, across the English Channel, but to cross the ocean with tons of copper was risky, and impractical.)
So, none of that was true. The ancient Amerindians learned how to work the nuggets of pure copper all by themselves.
In the mid 1900s, better tools allowed the dating by radiocarbon of copper finds, and we learned that some of them were very ancient, and indigenous to the New World.
The Copper
The Amerindian people used native copper, a rare and very pure (95% purity) grade of metallic copper. It appears as nuggets, with the typical red color of copper (see picture above). For this reason it was easily found, and used. Current copper mines used low purity, highly oxidized mineral, that requires complex mechanical and chemical processing of thousands of tons of ore, to obtain a few hundred pounds of pure metal.
The Great Lakes area is one of the few regions in the world, where native copper is found. The activity of glaciers also bulldozed the ore, spreading copper across the surface. The natives also dug mines to extract native copper. They used stone hammers, and also heating and cooling cycles to break the rock apart (light a fire, and cool the rock suddenly with cold water).
The copper nuggets were then processed. The North American natives had not learned how to smelt copper, or blend it with tin to make bronze. They used cold techniques to work the metal: they hammered it into shape. Another process they used was to heat it to make it more malleable, a process known as annealing (at 800°C, - 1470°F it softens but does not melt the copper).
They embossed, perforated, engraved, and also riveted the objects that they crafted (Source), copper trade carried the metal from the Great Lakes across the continent, even 1,500 km (900 mi) south of the Great Lakes (Source).
Below are two images of some of the Wulfing copper objects, unearthed in a farm in Malden, Missouri, in the late 1800s. They date to around 1200-1400 AD. (Source) they are named after the collector who donated them to the Museum; they are good examples of the artistry achieved by the native metalworkers.
The following image is the "falcon", that was excavated at the Hopewell Culture National Historical Park (Source):
These were delicate, carefully crafted objects, made by skilled artisans. They show us an alternative reality about the Native Americans. People who had sophisticated societies, religion, and also an organization that supported trade, mining, and craftsmen capable of working the copper metal. They weren't only people that hunted buffalo and lived in teepees. Amerindians thousands of years ago, lived in complex societies, like the mound-builders, in urban-agricultural settings, producing ceramics and beautiful objects like those depicted above.
There is no need to concoct a pre-Clovis civilization like the one proposed by Graham Hancock, the natives themselves developed their own civilization starting from scratch.
An example of their elaborate culture can be seen at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Cahookia, just east of St. Louis, in Southern Illinois, it has mounds that are over 30 m (100 ft) tall, and had a population of 10,000 to 40,000 residents. This required an advanced agricultural and social organization. I wrote about them in my Route 66 website because the site is located right beside on of U.S. 66's alignments. Below you can see what we think they looked like in AD 1,100.
Decline and Collapse
But, shortly after, the mound-culture vanished. Starting in 1200 AD, weather changed, a cycle of drought and floods hit the region. It was followed by a Little Ice Age. The large semi-urban populations that depended on agriculture suffered the effects. Famine, social unrest, environmental degradation led to a gradual depopulating of these towns. By the early and mid 1500s, few of them remained.
These final days of these mound villages were mentioned by the ruthless Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto in 1540, when he rode from Florida across the Southeastern USA and along the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. de Soto attacked the natives, killing many, maiming and torturing captives, a brutal man of his time. He mentions some of these fortified cities (Coosa, Mabila, Cofitachequi). This expedition more or less coincides with the final stage of decline and destruction of these cities which was probably promoted by the Old World diseases introduced by the Europeans, (smallpox, measles, flu...) which led to the "Great Dying" that exterminated 90% of the Amerindian population starting in 1492.
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