- 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]
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
- 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?
- 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.
- 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.
When you're presented these objects
or when archaeologists find them,
how do you figure out what these things were used for?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.