cc  >> I'm the campus Dean here  at the University of Wisconsin  Baraboo Sauk County.  I'm also an associate professor  of anthropology and archaeology.  And I'd like to welcome you to  the campus, to our spring  lecture series.  It just happens I'm the speaker  this evening.  I'd also like for welcome our  guest Wisconsin Public  Television.  This will air as part of a  series covering Wisconsin  professors, in this case talking  about a Wisconsin topic.  I start this evening, I want to  tell you a little bit about my  background and my interest in  this topic.  I grew up in northeast Wisconsin  on the shores of Green Bay,  started to find Native American  artifacts in my backyard.  My parents were very interested.  I went off to college, actually  in high school, and took a field  school in archaeology and found  you could get paid to do this  and 11 years later ended up with  a PhD in the field. 

 And I've taught at UW Madison,  UW La Crosse and have been in  the UW colleges for some time  and been here for this is going  on my fourth year.  My interest in this field,  particularly in this topic,  came about with, really, a  confrontation with trying to  understand how Native Americans  lived in the past in our region,  and most people when they think  of the prehistory of Wisconsin,  think of native peoples, tend to  think of stone tool  technologies.  Native peoples have been in the  state for over 12,000 years.  They have predominately used  stone, bone, hide, a variety of  organic materials, and in the  last 2,000 years, pottery.  But most people don't think of  Native Americans making metal  tools.  But, yet, from our research, and  we now know and people who have  studied this, that native  peoples have been producing  metal tools in Wisconsin for at  least 6,000 years.  In fact, the oldest metal  working cultures in North  America exist in Wisconsin,  Minnesota, the Lake Superior  basin, Ontario, Quebec, the  surrounding states that surround  this deposit of natural copper  that native peoples began to  explore very early on.  The lecture this evening will  take you through what we know  from the lens of an  archaeologist about the people  that produce these tools.  And much of the information I'm  going to focus on comes from the  cemeteries of people that lived  in our state between 6,000 and  3,000 years ago and the types of  things that were left behind in  their graves that tell us a  great deal about how these  people lived.  Well the term old copper, that  name is a very old term that was  first coined by a famous  archaeologist in Wisconsin by  the name of McKern to refer to  these literally thousands of  green oxidized tools that had  been found across Wisconsin,  Michigan, Minnesota,  the Canadian border along  the Great Lakes. 

 And when they were first  discovered in great numbers,  really when these initial finds  took place was about the 1850s  to the turn of the century.  Significant numbers of these  types of tools were found as  farmers cleared the landscape in  the region and began to find  these metal tools that were  often green in color because as  copper oxidizes it turns green  much like the roof of a church  or a copper statue outside.  And the initial scholars that  looked at these things, if you  go back and look at the  literature of scholars,  historians and archaeologists  writing prior to, let's say,  1880, they talk about bronze  technology in North America and  in Wisconsin.  And if you read even further in  the literature, you read about  ideas that perhaps these types  of tools are evidence of some  pre-Native American culture that  was here prior to the arrival of  native peoples that was  potentially European in origin  and that native peoples somehow  displaced them.  And it was a common idea that  was actually centered around the  investigation of Native American  mounds.  Most of these tools pre-date  mound building.  But prior to 1850, 1870s, many  scholars thought that the mounds  in North America were built by  some people other than native  peoples, meaning other than  Native Americans.  So this discovery of what was  originally thought to be bronze,  lead some scholars to believe  that hypothesis and to support  it with this evidence.  Today we know that's untrue.  That all of these types of tools  are made out of virtually 99%  pure copper and that the source  of this metal is the Great Lakes  and that they were made by the  ancestors of modern Indian  peoples and that the native  peoples who are here in the  Great Lakes today have an  incredibly rich history and a  prehistory that extends into a  very complex metal-working  culture that extended back  several millennia before BC. 

 The term that I'm going to use  to describe these people, an  archaeological term, is the term  archaic.  And this is an artificial term.  There is no Native American who  said, "I'm an archaic Indian,"  who refer to themselves  in that way.  It's a made up term.  A construct to describe the  types of cultures that existed  in our region from roughly the  end of the Ice Age up until  about 1000 BC, or so.  So roughly 6000 to 8000 BC, to  1000 BC, depending upon where  you are in the Great Lakes, and  it's dependent upon how cultures  change in different regions.  Refers to primarily cultures  that were hunters and gatherers.  There was no horse technology,  Europeans brought horses to the  region.  No ceramic technology.  No mound building. 

 But mobile hunter/gatherers that  lived in extended bands, perhaps  20, and maybe in large groups  of 40 or 50 people that moved  around the landscape focusing  on resources as they became  available at certain times  of the year.  And this is an artist depiction  of sort of everything you could  possibly do during warm weather  in the archaic tradition.  You have people fishing,  harvesting terrestrial mammals,  aquatic reptiles, a collection  of a variety of wild plants, in  this case acorns and a variety  of nut materials.  People depended upon what nature  could produce.  Archaic peoples did not have  agricultural technology.  And in that environment people  depended heavily upon stone for  the production of tools to  obtain food.  Now, this obviously is not  February in Wisconsin.  In fact, this artist  reconstruction represents the  archaic tradition south of  Wisconsin, really probably in  the lower Mississippi River  Valley, but the types of things,  the economy, the way people are  living is very representative of  what the Baraboo area, what much  of Wisconsin may have looked  like 6,000 years ago if you were  to come across native peoples in  warm weather, not in the winter,  of the types of activities that  they would be involved in.  And there's one image that I  want to point out here that has  some significance and that's  this guy.  The only domesticated animal  that native peoples had in our  region was the dog, which was  likely domesticated out of wolf  populations, and dogs are  excellent animals for  hunter/gatherers. 

 Those of you who own dogs know  that they eat almost anything  so they're easy to feed.  They clean up lots of waste,  they're sort of like having a  vacuum cleaner around that you  live with.  You can use them as an alarm  signal in case someone is to  encroach on your territory.  You can use them to hunt.  And as we know native peoples  did during this timeframe, if  you're in a pinch you can eat  them.  Which we know Native Americans  did.  And the first evidence of dog  use in our region occurs in the  context of archaic life ways and  in the context of these early  metal using cultures.  So the term archaic refers to a  group of cultures from roughly  6000 BC, to 1000 BC, and in  the context of that, Native  Americans began to produce metal  during this timeframe.  So fairly a quick description or  summary of the archaic concept.  Now the types of technologies  and tools that native peoples  used during this timeframe were  predominately spear, dart,  fishing technology, woodworking  technology and stone was  critical to survival on  landscape. 

 You had to be able to find the  right stone to make knives,  projectile points, things that  would allow you to harvest food.  In fact, the right stone to make  tools was probably more  important than having the  greatest density of food  resources.  You couldn't get to the food  resources unless you had the  right raw material to make a  tool to harvest them.  And it's in that context that  native peoples were exploring  the region, gathering stone,  making stone tools that likely  in the Great Lakes someone  picked up, or multiple peoples  at multiple points in time, what  looked like stone that happened  to be green, and when they  hammered it, it contracted and  expanded instead of flaked.  Metal behaves very differently  than stone and it's a completely  different technology.  And it's in that environment  that native peoples began to  produce amazing tools when you  consider the technology that  was used to make them.  This is just a sample of some of  the projectile points, and when  you use the term projectile  point these are not arrow  points.  They are spear points or dart  points.  And these are made all by hot  and cold hammering of taking  copper and compressing it by  hammering it, polishing it,  grinding it, cutting it,  applying heat to release tension  after it's hammered, but there's  no direct evidence, at least  that I have seen that's  convincing, to demonstrate that  native peoples ever utilized  heat to the point where they  could melt metal.  Virtually all of the tools that  have been found show evidence of  hot and cold hammering, no  evidence of alloying so there's  no mixing of metals other than  occasionally where copper and  silver occurs together, there's  some implements where you'll see  bits of silver in the tool, but  for the most part this is taking  raw material, raw metal and  cutting, grinding, hammering it  away to produce elaborate tools  like this. 

 These are all socketed  projectile points where a wooden  shaft, this would have been  placed on a wooden shaft,  sometimes with a rivet in the  base, and these have a  tremendous advantage over stone  in terms of the fact that  they're recyclable.  If you throw this stone weapon  at something you and miss,  instead of it breaking like a  flake stone spear point, it will  bend, and you can heat it,  recycle it, use it over and over  again.  You also have to remember that  these were used and coveted by  people.  They were probably polished,  honed to a mirror-like  appearance, so instead of being    green and oxidized, someone that  had one of these items it would  have appeared reflective,  it would have been something  that would have been seen  from a long distance away.  And the point that I'm trying  to make is that these tools  held more than purely  a functional importance to the  people that produced them.  They were made in a world where  the majority of people in North  America made tools out of stone  and bone, but in our region  people had access to a  technology that other people  did not have.  And they often traded this  technology outside of the  region.  A whole variety of woodworking  tools, and this is just a small  sample.  Unfortunately, because of the  antiquity of these things,  all of them likely made, the  majority of the material I'm  going to show you this evening  was made in our region between  6000 BC, or 8,000 years ago,  and 1000 BC,  or 3,000 years ago.  Most of these tools have been  found as surface implements and  literally thousands of each of  these types have been found. 

 This is a sample of a whole  variety of axes and chisels and  gouges, and when you look at  this, we don't have direct  evidence of the types of  dwellings that these people  made.  We suspect they had watercraft,  probably dug out canoes, but  when you see assemblages of  these elaborate types of gouges  and chisels, it tells us that  people were definitely experts  in woodworking.  If you're a contemporary  woodworker in the audience, you  have a whole variety of chisels  and gouges that are designed for  if you're a wood carver.  We see these types of implements  in the archaeological record and  we can only speculate just how  elaborate the wood crafts that  these people were producing,  potentially masts, carved  canoes, all kinds of carved  wooden specialty items that  don't survive in Wisconsin  because of the environment that  we're in, that we have direct  evidence of these types of  activities.  A whole variety of knives.  And these look very similar to a  modern knife that you may be  familiar with in your kitchen.  They would have had a wooden or  bone tang at the base.  Again, a sharpened cut edge.  And they come in all variety of  forms from just less than an  inch and a half to, in some  cases, 16-18 inches in size.  This is a group that was  recovered from a site in  Marinette County, and these were  likely used in the production of  processing fish. 

 These make excellent tools for  staking out fish and processing  fish for drying and consumption.  Oops, let me go back here.  If you look at the thousands of  items that have been recovered,  one interesting element that  occurs from time to time is  artistic expression in these  tools.  And this is one example.  It's a copper knife, would have  had a wooden handle, and if you  look closely down the center of  a blade you can see a series of  punctures, a chisel or a punch  has been applied to produce a  design.  I've handle, literally hundreds  if not thousands of these types  of tools, and I would guess  somewhere in the neighborhood of  maybe 10% have a design element  in them.  And we have no idea what this  represents.  Is it an owner's mark?  Is it a maker's mark?  Is it passage of time?  In the case of projectile  points, is it numbers of kills?  When you see a large group of  these from a region there are  individual designs that seem to  reoccur that would almost  suggest that they represent  manufacturer marks or ownership  marks.  They obviously have some  symbolic meaning to a people  that didn't have written  language that is some insight  into the past about these  prehistoric life ways.  Now the neat thing about copper,  and one of the reasons I'm so  interested in studying this for  over 15 years, is that the  material itself, when it  oxidizes, when it becomes  exposed to water and air and  produces this green salt or  patina on it, it has a tendency  to preserve organic material  that it comes in contact with. 

 And we live in an environment  where there's freezing and  thawing, hot and cold  temperatures, archaeologists  rarely get to handle ancient  organic materials here.  We rarely see textile, we rarely  see hide, we rarely see bits of  clothing from societies that are  thousands of years old because  of the environment that we live  in that those materials are so  perishable.  But on occasion, in part if  other types of materials come in  contact with cooper artifacts,  they'll be preserved.  In this case, this is a knife  from the Lake Superior region,  and if you look at the surface  that's highlighted here there  are actually preserved fish  scales embedded in the surface  of the knife.  This is a knife that was used  for processing fish.  It was subsequently lost and the  oxidation of the copper  preserved the organic material,  in this case a specific of fish,  embedded in the knife.  These are great things for  archaeologist to find because we  can potentially radiocarbon date  them.  We can analyze what types of  food these tools were being used  to produce.  Occasionally we find wooden  shaft fragments that we can  identify the species of wood and  radiocarbon date and know how  hold that particular tool was.  Very few classes of artifacts  that we find in Wisconsin have  that type of potential for doing  this type of analysis. 

 This is a knife that probably  most of you have not seen unless  you happen to have traveled to  the Arctic.  The Ulu or crescent knife is a  knife that's very common in  Arctic native societies, Inuit  and other native peoples of the  Arctic region.  It's a copper, in this case it's  made out of copper, but it's a  crescent-shaped knife that would  have had a wooden or bone handle  across the top.  And here's a modern Arctic  native person using one of these  types of knives.  A little bit different design  but you can see this curved  form.  The work exceptionally well for  processing fish.  And it used to be thought that  the oldest examples of this type  of crescent-shaped knife  originated in the Arctic.  That it was designed there, that  it extends into the great  antiquity of Arctic cultures of  the Canadian Shield or the high  Arctic.  But now we know some of the  oldest examples in the Americas  come from right here in  Wisconsin.  And occasionally we get wooden  and bone handle fragments across  the top. 

 They work exceptionally well.  I actually have a stainless  steel version at home at my  house that I use for slicing up  hors d'oeuvres when I have  archaeology guests over.  In the Arctic, certain forms  have been associated with  sex-specific or gender specific  roles.  So there are certain forms of  this knife in Arctic native  populations that are only used  by women or only used by  children, others that are male  specific.  So far where these are been  found in excavated context with  human skeletal material where  we've been able to sex  skeletons, they've showed up  almost exclusively with females.  So they may very well be a  female specific technology.  Now if we find a number of  males, that will challenge that  interpretation, but there seems  to be a parallel with the Arctic  in terms of who is using these  types of knives in societies.  All kinds of fishing gear and  you have to envision ways in  which native peoples could have  obtained fish in prehistory.  Netting is one possibility.  Clubbing fish, often done,  spearing fish. 

 But making a fish hook out of  something like stone or bone is  fairly complicated compared to  metal.  Metal gives you an advantage in  terms of fishing technology.  There aren't a whole lot of  commercial fish hooks available  today made out of bone.  When you buy fish hooks they  tend to be made out of metal.  And we find lots of examples of  these in prehistory in our  region.  These are more common fish  hooks, forms that we're familiar  with today.  They very rarely will have a  hole in the top.  They often have a little abraded  constriction for wrapping a  lanyard around either leather or  vegetable, twisted vegetable  material, vegetation material.  This is a group of fish hooks  that likely came from a set  line.  If you're familiar with set line  technology today this is where  you have a series of fish hooks  spread out over a line with bait  attached to them, tied to either  a tree or a float. 

 They're often used for  harvesting catfish, sometimes  turtles, snapping turtles.  And basically these are put out,  the game comes up, grabs the  bait and then you come back  after a period of time, pull in  your set line and harvest  whatever aquatic resource you're  after.  This is a neat example because  this is likely a group of fish  hooks that was tied on a line  that was in someone's pocket  that fell our of their pocket  and then oxidized into a lump  found by a single metal  detector.  And then these tools.  And these are amazing items.  These are toggling head  harpoons.  And we know from the  archaeological record in the  Great Lakes that sturgeon often  occurred in weights of excess of  150, sometimes close to 200  pounds.  Catfish in excess of 100-pound  category.  Northern pike, similar size.  Imagine spearing a 150-pound  fish or trying to take that with  a fish hook. 

 That's basically the weight of a  person.  These types of tools are very  sophisticated technologies that  allowed people to harvest game  that size.  And the way they worked is they  are a cone of copper, a rolled  sheet of copper with a barb on  one end, I need to get my arrow  over here, and then usually a  pair of holes halfway down the  cone.  And the way they worked is you  would have a wooden spear shaft  that this item would be placed  loosely on the shaft and then a  lanyard that would come off of  this.  And you would spear a fish, you    would remove the wooden shaft  and the fish would pull away  with this point embedded in it  and what you would have is a  long coil of rope or twine  that's coiled up with a handle  on it that you could then play  the fish like a line.  You could tie it to a tree, tie  it to a canoe, this type of  technology works particularly  well for something like large  fish.  It's used in the Arctic for  large mammals.  And we used to think that the  oldest examples of these that  they were invented in the  Arctic.  Today, we have radiocarbon dates  on these items from the Great  Lakes from the 4000s BC, and  they were used extensively in  the upper Great Lakes for  harvesting very large fish that   would not have otherwise been  possible.  We also see fish hooks, types of  fishing gear that you're maybe  not familiar with today. 

 This is a gorge.  And the way these things worked,  here's an example of these over  here.  They're fairly common copper  artifacts.  This is from Winnebago County.  And you have a sliver of metal  or bone that was wrapped with  bait, and this would be  suspended horizontally in the  water.  The fish comes up, grabs this  thing and it spins sideways in  their throat and then you can  pull the fish to shore.  It's a fairly sophisticated  tool, but, again, all this  technology allowed people to  live in an environment without  agriculture.  And live year-round in  Wisconsin.  The toughest times, of course,  would be winter months.  Ice fishing, very important in  prehistory in Wisconsin,  spearing through the ice as well  as dangling bait with fishing  technology like this. 

 Oops, let me go back here.  Other fixed type harpoons.  Some of these were likely used  for things like muskrats, small  aquatic mammals.  And these occur fairly  frequently.  I've seen thousands of these  types of implements, some that  have rivet holes in the bottom  where a copper rivet would have  been inserted to attach them to  the shaft.  And native peoples at historic  times were using similar types  of tools like this made out of  bone.  Needles, fairly common.  All kinds of forms of needles.  And these occur often on coastal  sites along waterways.  The waterways in prehistory were  the highways across the state of  Wisconsin. 

 If you walk the shorelines of  Lake Michigan archaeological  sites this timeframe often have  these types of tools likely used  for making netting, weaving fish  nets.  And interesting technology in  terms of the way they were made.  The hole is not drilled.  It's a hammered flat end of  copper, and then it's a braided  elliptical hole to pass the  material through that was woven.  And in addition to all of the  tools that I just showed you  that are all obviously related  to making a living on the  landscape, to obtaining food,  people produced ornaments,  things that went beyond the  practical nature, often to  convey prestige within their  societies.  To convey importance, maybe to  convey specific gender roles  within a society.  And this is from one site on  Lake Nipigon in Ontario.  It's from a single burial, and  you can see a whole series of  projectile points, these are  spear points, axes and chisels,  more spear points, and then  bangles that would have been  sewn on a garment.  And you can just imagine what  these sounded like when the  person walked jingling and if  they were reflective and had a  mirror like finish to them.  A series of bracelets and a  series of beads. 

 And this other item that looks  like a corkscrew or a ladle that  we have no idea what it is, but  it's an interesting piece.  So you have tools and ornaments  made, most of the early material  seems to be tools.  And there's a gradual shift  toward more and more  ornamentation and personal  status items as these societies  became more complex, and I'll  talk a little bit more about  that in a few minutes here.  Well, what was the source of  this metal?  I mentioned that almost  everything that you've seen this  evening in terms of these copper  materials were made out of local  materials from the Lake Superior  basin, and there were two  primary deposits that native  people had access to.  One was the area shown in green  which was the proper geology  where copper occurs in vein form  that could be mined.  And the second source is any  area of glaciated Wisconsin or  adjacent states where you have  glacial deposits and you have  gravel, you can find copper  nuggets.  It's fairly common to go out on  the landscape and you can find  copper the size of a pea or  copper nuggets that haven't been  used that are naturally produced  the size, the largest ones that  have been found in excess of  several tons.  And native people mined these  things either directly from the  mine deposits or from glacial  till deposits.  This region in particular,  the Keweenaw Peninsula, is just  filled with prehistoric  Indian mines.  If you've been up to Michigan  Tech up in Houghton, they do a  significant amount of research  on these mining sites, these  ancient mining sites. 

 This is our closest national  park which I encourage you to  visit if you have not,  Isle Royale.  More people visit Yellowstone,  I'm told, in one day than visit  Isle Royale in an entire year.  It's an amazing island of about  I believe it's 50 miles filled  with natural copper deposits,  and there are still prehistoric  Indian mines of this antiquity  that you can visit and walk into  in this national park as well as  on the Keweenaw Peninsula.  So any place that you see green  on the map are places where  Native Americans could mine vein  deposit, and any area that was  glaciated in our region are also  places where people could have  picked up natural nuggets of  what's referred to as float  copper.  This is a photograph of an  excavation, I believe it was  done by the Milwaukee Public  Museum in perhaps the 1920s,  or so, where archaeologists  excavated a filled in  prehistoric Indian copper mine.  And what you see is the modern  surface, and this is the mine  shaft.  It's been filled with refuse and  debris over thousands or years.  And all of these round stones  that you see down at the bottom  are prehistoric hammers.  Imagine mining copper,  metal mining without modern  technology, without modern  drills, without blasting,  without steam shovels,  hydraulics.  That the technology that was  often used was to build fires on  the surface of where copper is  embedded in stone, heat up the  surrounding rock, cool it with  water very quickly which often  causes it to further crack, and  then use these hammers, which  are basically cobbles of basalt  or granite that are picked up  from the shoreline, to hammer  away at the material to extract  the metal. 

 And thousands of these mines  covered the upper Great Lakes  region when Europeans first  arrived.  They were used extensively by  native peoples to collect and  mine this copper.  Occasionally a few early  geologists that came into  Wisconsin and Minnesota recorded  what these mines looked like  when they first saw them.  Today most of them have been  obliterated.  They've been damaged by modern  mining techniques.  This is a fairly famous mine,  and it's a drawing done by,  I believe it was Winchill who  later became Minnesota's state  geologist.  And what he shows here is a very  interesting diagram, an insight  into how prehistoric peoples  mined metal.  What you see is a shaft down  from the top following a vein of  copper.  Here there is still vein copper  in place in the ground.  And this in this case they  actually removed a very large  piece of copper maybe in excess  of several hundred pounds, and  they were trying to crib it,  elevate it up out of the mine by  placing cribbing underneath to  build it up and remove it, take  it out of the mine shaft. 

 Now, what you have to remember  is that native peoples did not  have the ability to melt metal,  they did not have the ability to  saw up large chunks of metal.  In this case, they hammered the  entire surface smooth and had to  leave it in place.  And I often tell students when  you used to lecture about this  in my class is today this would  be like finding a piece of gold  the size of a Volkswagen Bug but  not being able it take it with  you and not having any  technology to remove it or break  it down to a further form.  There had been a lot of large  pieces of copper like this found  in ancient mines or on the  surface where the entire surface  has been hammered over where  native peoples have tried to  extract every flange and every  usable piece of metal given the  technology that they had.  But without the ability to melt  it, a large piece eventually  would have to be left in place.  Well how do we know how these  things were made?  And there's still quite a few  folks that write about the fact  that they think this metal was  melted and alloyed and that  there was trade with ancient  Europe.  There's no conclusive evidence  to support any of those  hypotheses.  There's no direct evidence of  melting of metal, there's no  direct evidence of alloying and  there's no convincing evidence  whatsoever that native peoples  had trade outside of North  America.  There are people writing about  it, talking about possibilities  but there has never, to my  satisfaction no demonstration to  support any of these three  possibilities.  If we actually look at these  metal tools, we can x-ray them  and look at the technology used  for making. 

 They often show forms of folding  and hammering that occur when  you x-ray a metal tool.  We can chemically analyze them  to show that they're nearly pure  copper.  And we can look at them under  the microscope very closely.  This is native copper under  magnification without any type  of human manipulation.  These are what most of the tools  from the Great Lakes look like  under the microscope.  And this is what cast copper  looks like that has a pitted  surface to it.  Very different type of x-ray, a  different type of surface than a  tool that's been made by hot and  cold hammering.  And finally the other  technology, the way that you can  investigate this is to replicate  these tools.  And I've actually done this with  a number of different students,  and particularly art metal  students are a lot of fun to  work because they have jewelry  training or art training and  then you bring them into an  archaeological context and say I  want you to replicate this tool  using these techniques that we  think that were used.  One of the things you learn very  quickly is this is very labor  intensive, it's a good way to  get a headache. 

 Lots of pounding and compacting  and you find that by using  wooden tongs and simply rock  hammers and grinding surfaces  that we can replicate almost  identical forms that we see in  the archaeological record and we  can learn about the processes  that were used to manufacture  these tools.  Well, everything that I have  discussed to this point is  information that has come  predominately from surface  collected material.  Surface collected material has  the least interpretive value to  archaeologists.  Archaeologists are, someone may  disagree with this term, but we  are sophisticated crime scene  investigators.  We are sophisticated in that we  are dealing with crime scenes  that are very remote in time.  And the clues have often  degraded, often multiple crimes  scenes have occurred on top of  the same location throughout  windows of time, and so the  complexity of trying to infer  and interpret human behavior  from the clues is much more  difficult than dealing with a  modern crime scene because in  this case it may have had 4,000  years of time for the crime  scene to be mucked up, to be  contaminated, to be changed  through nature or through other  human activity.  So for archaeologists, the most  important information, the kind  of information we want to find  to interpret ancient cultures,  is information that's left in  the ground in some pattern that  is a result of the behavior that  created it.  That's been undisturbed.  A time capsule, a window into  the culture that produced those  tools.  And the type of information that  I've studied to get a glimpse  into these peoples has come  almost exclusively from the  mortuary cemeteries of the  people that produce these tools. 

 And it was in the 1940s, the  1950s and 1960s, primarily  through accidental discovery,  that a series of Native American  cemeteries were discovered in  Wisconsin and Michigan that gave  us tremendous insight into how  these things were used and  something about the lives of  these people.  Today if these sites were  discovered, we have laws that  would protect them.  When they were discovered in the  '40s, '50s and '60s, there were  no laws that protected Native  American burial sites in  Wisconsin.  And in many cases these sites  would have been destroyed and  are destroyed or have been  destroyed through construction.  Today our goal would be  preservation.  The sites that I'm going to take  you to were excavated during  that time frame.  I spent a great deal of time in  the '90s reanalyzing the  collections that were obtained  through excavation by  archaeologists that worked at  these sites in the 1940s, '50s,  and '60s.  What I'm going to do is take you  to each one of them, and we're  going to look at what was found  there, what archaeologists  recovered and what it tells us  about these people.  And I'm going to take you to  these sites not in the order of  their discovery, but in the  order of their age from oldest  to most recent because we can  look at changes in the patterns  at these sites that reflect  changes in the culture over  time.  So the first site that we're  going to look at is in a remote  and exotic place, Oconto,  Wisconsin. 

 How many people have been there?  A few people have been to  Oconto.  Oconto is traditionally known  for the Bond Pickle Company, but  it's also known in fields of  archaeology as being one of the  oldest metalworking sites in the  Americas.  That's located right off of now  highway 41 as you're headed  north.  This was a site that was  discovered in the '50s.  It was a very interesting  discovery.  There was a large gravel quarry  on the edge of town, sand and  gravel quarry, and it was  allegedly a 13-year-old boy who  was walking around the edge of  the quarry and he found human  skeletal material.  Brought it to the local sheriff.  They were, of course, interested  was this a homicide, was it a  modern murder victim or accident  or foul play.  Quickly they determined that it  was likely prehistoric, and the  Wisconsin Historical Society,  but predominately the Milwaukee  Public Museum, came out and  excavated the rest of the site.  And what made the site important  is this line represents the edge  of the quarry. 

 So we don't know what was over  here.  And each one of these ovals  represents a burial pit where  human remains were buried in the  ground with artifacts.  So we had undisturbed human  remains with stone and bone  tools that you could radiocarbon  date.  You could determine the sex of  the individuals.  You could determine a profile of  the population.  You could look for pathologies  in terms of how these people  lived.  Tremendous amount of data.  We estimate from the skeletal  material there were about 50  people buried here.  At one time there were over 200.  So three quarters of the site  was destroyed by quarrying  activity. 

 We have no idea where that  information is, it's gone.  The archaeologists arrived and  only a quarter of the site  remained.  And they excavated and they  found some interesting patterns.  These are the types of things  what archaeologists look for in  the ground.  We are going to look at human  remains.  We need to be sensitive to that.  These are the skeletons and the  mortal remains of prehistoric  populations.  But it's a class of information  and it will tell us a great deal  about these people.  If you look at this image on  this side that I'm pointing to,  this is the modern ground  surface.  And this is ice age gravel and  sand. 

 And if you look closely you can  see a stain going down into a  deposit.  What that represents is someone  living on this surface dug down  in prehistory and put something  into that soil beneath.  In this case that is a human  cranium.  This is an excavation of that  feature.  It's a human burial in an  extended position.  Many of these burials contain  tools or offerings that reflect  everyday activities that were  buried with these people.  This is a burial, it's a little  hard to make out, but you're  looking at the flexed position  of a young woman, potentially in  late teens, early 20s.  The cranium is located here,  the vertebral column, she's in a  flexed position with the arms  and legs drawn up near the  chest, what we would call a  fetal position.  And then these bones over here  are a very young infant that  likely died during childbirth.  So you have a mother and child  that died during childbirth. 

 And then this item that you see  here is not human bone.  It's a very interesting  artifact.  It is either a flute or a  whistle.  And it is the oldest musical  instrument that has been found  in the western Great Lakes.  It's made from the upper right  humerus of a tundra swan.  It's cut, drilled.  Swan and other birds have hollow  bones that work very well  for musical instruments.  And it is obviously a very  special object.  I used to call it a whistle but  then at a national conference  someone said to me, how do you  know it's not a flute?  So in the literature I've  referred to it as a SED, a sound  emitting device, to appease my  colleagues.  We don't know what type of sound  emitting device it is. 

 But it's a very special item.  It's something that was made out  of local materials, and it was  obviously made to accompany  these people into the afterlife.  It's likely a very sacred object  and something that was a great  deal of intentional thought in  terms of placing it with these  individuals.  If we look at the artifacts from  Oconto, and here is that whistle  or flute below, whole series of  these Ulu knives that I showed  you were, the crescent knives,  remember those, projectile  points, fish hooks, woodworking  tools, a series of stone  projectile points, and only one  item, virtually everything from  the site was a tool, only one  item could be attributed to  being an ornament, a bracelet  found with a woman.  Everything else was  predominately a tool, and the  majority of the items from the  site, with the exception of a  couple of small scraps of marine  shell, was locally produced.  So if you look at the site, the  pattern are locally made tools,  almost exclusively tools  distributed with males and  females, adults and children.  There is no one individual with  a significant amount of wealth.  There doesn't appear to be items  that are made to convey status  and prestige.  From an anthropological point of  view, we would look at this  culture and describe it as  likely being egalitarian, that  males and females occupied sex  specific roles but that there  weren't high status individuals  that accumulated wealth.  How old is Oconto?  Well, when the site was  originally discovered in the  1950s the University of Chicago  had just developed radiocarbon  dating and there were a series  of radiocarbon dates run. 

 These C numbers represent the  laboratories from the University  of Chicago.  Dates between 5000  and into the 3000s BC.  Another date in the 1970s  on human bone was run at a  laboratory in Japan of roughly    3000 BC.  There was a great deal of debate  over how old this site is  because there were several  thousand years represented by  the radiocarbon dates.  This particular date seemed to  be the of great antiquity,  no other site had been dated  of that age.  And the way this technology  works for dating is that all of  us in the room and all living  things are absorbing C12 and  C14.  We're all consuming organic  material, and C14 is  radioactive, it breaks down at a  constant rate.  In 5,730 years there's half as  much C14 in relationship to C12  in terms of the original  content.  When something dies they cannot  replenish the C14.  So what the original tests or  the original theory behind  radiocarbon dating is that if  you could measure how much C12  and C14 is in an item that has  died in the past, you could  potentially estimate how much  time has elapsed since death. 

 That's the way C14 or  radiocarbon dating works.  Well, in the case of when this  site was radiocarbon dated, the  predominate material that was  used was charcoal, as well as  some bone, and you needed a very  large sample.  And you also got very wide  ranging dates with huge standard  deviations.  These dates are all, the early  dates are plus or minus 600  years, 400 years and so forth.  What this means, if you ran the  test on this sample a hundred  times, 67 of the hundred times  the date would likely fall  within 600 years either way of  that date.  It's a probability.  So when I began working on the  site, one of the things I wanted  to determine is just how old is  this.  I went back and looked at the  collections, and remember I  talked about copper, when it  comes in contact with organic  material, preserves organic  material.  Amazingly, going through the  collections at the Milwaukee  Public Museum, we came across a  sample of string that was still  attached to a copper knife.  We were able to radiocarbon date  that string through the  University of Arizona and came  back with a date  of 4070, plus or minus 60, BC. 

 One of my claims to fame is I  have the oldest date on a piece  of string in Wisconsin.  And this is a great thing to  date.  There's now some older string  fragments from the upper Great  Lakes that Toronto has dated.  But the thing that's important  about this is that it's truly an  artifact, we're dating the  string.  The people made the string.  Therefore, it seems to be a very  good item to assess the age of  the site.  It seems unlikely they had  antique string and it seems, of  course, very unlikely that they  had string from the future.  So if you look at these new  dates, which these AA numbers  represent, we have a date of  4070 from the string, another  date of 3300 from a charcoal  sample, if you exclude this  date, all of the dates  from Oconto fall between  3000 and 4000 BC.  And that is the age of the site.  It is 6,000 to 5,000 years old. 

 It is the oldest multiple burial  site in the state of Wisconsin.  And it is also one of the oldest  copper sites in our region.  So Oconto is the oldest site.  We have a pattern of an  egalitarian society that  produced local tools, some  minimal evidence of trade and  there isn't a pronounced pattern  of prestige and differential  status divisions within the  society.  Now let's look at the remaining  old copper sites.  This is Osceola.  It was discovered in Grant  County in the 1940s near Potosi.  The site consisted of a large  black stain eroding into the  Mississippi River that was  discovered by local sportsmen.  And the Milwaukee Public Museum  was called out, and it was a  large circular pit filled with  several hundred burials of  people where the flesh had  either decomposed or  intentionally been removed and  the bones were bundled together.  Along with this deposit of mixed  human remains were stone tools,  stone spear points, copper  tools, axes, knives, spear  points, and again, very little  ornamentation. 

 Virtually nothing in the way of  jewelry.  And the other interesting  pattern here is that the  artifacts were buried communally  with the group, not with any  one individual.  This, again, suggests a fairly  egalitarian pattern, not anyone  with pronounced status  differences.  Radiocarbon dates on the site  into the 2200s BC.  So in that sort of middle range.  A little bit younger than  Oconto.  And here are some of the copper  artifacts from Osceola.  These are woodworking tools,  awls, and the larger items are  axes or spuds that would be used  for woodworking.  Now we're going to look at two  sites that are dramatically  different from the pattern that  I have shown you from Oconto and  Osceola.  We're now going to go to Ray  which is outside of, not too far  from Oshkosh off of Lake  Winnebago. 

 And then we will go to the  Riverside Cemetery up on the  border of Wisconsin and  Michigan.  The Ray site, also discovered in  the 1950s, is a quarry site.  Oops, I keep jumping ahead.  And today it's in a major  subdevelopment.  They're all very beautiful large  homes that are located in this  area.  It was a farm when it the  discovered and a gravel pit.  The University of Wisconsin  Madison excavated it.  If you look closely, all of this  material is human skeletal  material eroding out of the  surface of this quarry.  It was discovered by local  folks.  The University of Wisconsin  Madison as well as the Oshkosh  Public Museum in Oshkosh  excavated the materials. 

 Well, what did they find?  A series of human burials, some  of them are bundled, meaning  where the flesh had either  decomposed or been removed and  the bones were placed there  afterwards.  A number of burials that were in  primary order.  Copper Ulu knives, woodworking  tools, projectile points, but  then look at this item.  This is a copper necklace with  hundreds of copper beads.  Very heavy.  In you were to run with this, if  it were to move significantly it  could knock you out in terms of  the weight.  It's something that would have  been very noticeable if you met  these people.  It would have been bright and  shinny, likely had other  material woven into it.  It clearly is something that  functioned beyond subsistence.  In other words, you likely  didn't use this to obtain food  except maybe from trade. 

 What it likely functioned as is  to show people this is a person  of some importance in this  society, that has some role  that's different than other  people.  Another example of Ray, this is  a male skeleton face down and  that is the burial of a canine,  of a dog.  This is one of the oldest dog  burials in the state of  Wisconsin.  And it shows you how important  animals were in the society, in  the case that the dog was  actually buried with this  individual.  We don't know if they died at  the same time, I can't tell you  that information, but they were  obviously buried together and  very important.  Couple of other unusual  patterns.  This is the edge of the quarry,  and what you're looking at is  damage to human skeletal  material as a result of quarry  activity, and this object that  you see here is not human bone.  It's a gorget, a type of broach  or pendant, and it's made out of  whelk, marine whelk.  The closest source of this  material would be the Gulf Coast  of Mexico or the far  southeastern United States, the  Atlantic Seaboard.  But yet this is found in  Winnebago County, Wisconsin, in  a site that dates to about  1700 BC. 

 It is placed on the burial of an  adult female.  It would have been sort of had  an opaque mother of pearl  reflective quality to it, and it  would have been something that  you would have noticed  immediately if you engaged this  person in any kind of  conversation.  It clearly functioned as a  status object.  And it was obtained over a  significant distance.  By 2000 BC in Wisconsin it was  possible for someone living in  Oshkosh to obtain an object that  the raw material came from the  Gulf Coast of Mexico.  Before the advent of FedEx and  UPS.  Without of horses, in terms of  if you think of the distance  this had to move.  And if you travel down to the  southeastern United States to  sites this timeframe, you see  copper items that are made out  of material that likely came  from the Great Lakes.  And we begin to see long  distance trade networks that are  developed on the river systems  in the upper Midwest and eastern  North America.  A particularly interesting item,  what is likely the handle of an  axe, this is an elk antler  that's been cut with a hole in  one end, and although these  items weren't found side by  side, they were both found at  the same site. 

 This is one of the copper axe  pieces made out of socketed  copper that fits very nicely  into that handle that shows you  how this particular tool was  used.  And perhaps the most unusual  burial at the site, it is a very  strong argument that this  society was not completely  egalitarian, is burial number  six.  This is an adult male with  several subadults, and he his  wearing a copper feathered  headdress.  And if you look over at the  right, you will see those copper  feathers.  Here they've been removed, these  are bone projectile points.  This is a one of a kind.  There has never been another  individual in the Great Lakes  discovered with this type of  headdress.  You, again, have to image this  is bright, shiny and reflective,  relatively heavy.  And why would someone have this?  Why would they invest in this  technology?  This is clearly someone that  has a very important leadership  role in the community.  Either they're a Shaman, or  a political leader of some kind. 

 These are likely societies where  you achieve status, you don't  inherit it but you achieve it  for being an outstanding hunter,  an outstanding negotiator in  terms of dealing with perhaps  the enemy or other neighboring  competing groups.  Very different from anything  we have seen thus far.  And each one of these could have  been a projectile point.  So it's a very expensive  headdress to produce in terms of  how this material is being used.  So Ray, a little bit more recent  in time, shows evidence of trade  all the way to the Gulf Coast of  Mexico, pronounced differences  in status between individuals  and an interest in producing  prestige items.  And also, I mentioned the marine  shell.  A term we like to use in the  archaeological record is  exotica, the presence of exotic  materials imported to the region  predominately for prestige.  Well, the next site that we're  going to look at, and the final  site, is the Riverside site.  And this is where I spent a lot  of my time as a graduate  student.  It's a site that's not too far  from my home. 

 This is the Menominee River.  The city of Menominee, Michigan,  Marinette, Wisconsin.  University of Wisconsin  Marinette campus is right over  here.  I grew up along the shoreline.  And it was in the 1950s and '60s  that on this bend in the river,  a site that would really change  our understanding of prehistory  from the region was discovered  by the University of Michigan.  It was excavated first by the  University of Michigan, then in  the 1960s by the Oshkosh Public  Museum and the Milwaukee Public  Museum with a National Science  Foundation grant.  And it's a late archaic end of  the old copper sequence site,  known as the Riverside Cemetery.  It's an interesting story of how  it was discovered.  This is Dr. Albert Spaulding  from the University of Michigan.  World-famous archaeologist. 

 The two power house schools of  archaeology in the Great Lakes  and North America were the  University of Wisconsin Madison  and the University of Michigan.  I am a product of the University  of Wisconsin Madison.  And these two schools had been  investigating the Great Lakes to  understand the prehistory.  Wisconsin had discovered a  number of ancient metal  producing sites but Michigan had  not.  And Spaulding was very  interested in this, and so he  spent a number of seasons in the  upper peninsula with his  graduate students looking for  sites of this age similar to  what had been found in  Wisconsin.  And he happened to meet this  fellow.  Robert Hruska, who was an  avocational archaeologist and,  at the time, a taxi cab driver  and trapper who knew a great  deal about local archaeology who  told Spaulding about the  Riverside site, took him to it  and Spaulding began excavating.  He was so impressed with  Hruska's work that he hired  Hruska as a field assistant for  a period of time.  Spaulding went on to become  affiliated with the National  Science Foundation, and then  Hruska, amazingly, without  formal training, did an  outstanding job, went on to  become a curator of anthropology  at the Oshkosh Public Museum.  He later, in the '60s, secured a  National Science Foundation  grant working with Robert  Ritzenthaler at the Milwaukee  Public Museum, went back to the  site and excavated for three  years and probably obtained the  most amount of data that we have  about these societies. 

 Really an amazing story.  He did an outstanding job.  He received the Lapham Research  Medal for his work.  And of all the sites that I have  described, this one was  excavated by someone who just  took amazing notes and recovered  a tremendous amount of material  that we could later analyze.  Well, when Michigan worked at  the site in the '50s they found  a number of interesting burials.  Very late in the copper sequence  native peoples began to cover  their burials with red pigment,  what's referred to as red ochre.  So what you're looking at in the  middle image is a human burial,  that's the cranium, in the  flexed position of an adult  male, and that red staining is  ground iron ore hematite to  produce a blood red pigment in  the ground.  It obviously had some very  spiritual meaning to these  people.  Buried with this individual  several severed dog skulls,  heads, that were decapitated and  buried with the individual, as  well as a kit of copper tools  and stone tools and,  interestingly, some barren  ground caribou from the  sub-Arctic.  This is the southern most  example of caribou that's been  found that likely came in by a  trade that was turned into a  tool of some kind. 

 So Spaulding spent a couple  seasons there then Hruska came  back.  Oops, let me go back.  And excavated 1961, '62 and '63.  He had a number of famous  graduate students that went to  become famous archaeologists.  This won't mean a whole lot to  the general public, but to the  archaeological community this is  Bob Hruska.  This is Emeritus Professor  Jim Stoltman of UW Madison  as a graduate student.  He was my major professor who  worked at the site.  My uncle worked at the site, my  father worked at the site.  So to come back as an  archaeologist and reanalyze this  material was a very exciting  thing, with these connections.  A whole variety of stone and  copper tools found. 

 This is a stone spear thrower  weight.  What they excavated was a  significant area.  Each one of these squares is  five by five feet.  And they recovered over 80  distinctive feature pits, many  of which were burials that  contained human remains.  Some of these pits were tombs.  And in the case that you see  here, they're following a stain  in the ground, this is often  what we see as disturbed Earth,  that is going down in excess 14,  15 feet that was lined with logs  and birch bark and contained the  burials of multiple families.  Almost a family crypt that was  used time and time again.  A number of these burials were  cremated and sewn into textile  packets, wrapped in birch bark  and covered with grave  offerings.  A whole variety of copper tools,  projectile points these Ulu  knives, but if you weigh all the  copper from the site, 55% of it  is in the form of ornaments.  There's a shift from tools to  ornaments during this timeframe. 

 This site dates a thousand to  500 BC.  This is one of the more amazing  artifacts.  It's a drawing but a copper  woodworking tool with a wooden  handle that had a beaver incisor  tooth inserted in the back that  would have been used for  processing hides.  So you could have punched holes,  and then removed and processed  hide with the back of this  implement or used it as a knife.  Some unusual patterns and again  you need to be sensitive, we're  looking at human remains here  but it's an important window  into the past.  This is a the burial of a fetus  wrapped with several dozen  copper beads, a copper axe,  placed in woven textile and  covered with red pigment.  What's important about this is  hunter/gatherer societies that  are egalitarian or that have  achieved status often, when a  very young child dies, they may  be disposed of in refuse, they  may not be given special  treatment because they have not  yet contributed to the society.  So when you start to see this  pattern, it tells you that you  have societies where individuals  are somehow given some special  status at birth.  That they are belonging to  families that have some  political connections, some  disproportionate access to  power, prestige and wealth.  I went through and weighed  almost all the copper at the  site. 

 There was 1800 grams of copper,  and, as I mentioned, 55% of it  was in the form of ornaments,  beads, bangles that were placed  as status objects with,  interestingly, predominately  women and children.  Very little in the way  of with males.  There's also fairly evident  examples of violence at the  site.  This is an adult woman, has a  stone projectile point embedded  right below the mandible.  A spear that would have entered  from the back and was snapped  off and no question caused  death.  There are a number of other  individuals with injuries that  reflect violence.  We do not know if that's  violence within the society or  between societies.  But during this timeframe,  1000 BC, we have multiple  sites in Wisconsin that show  direct evidence of violence, and  competition between people.  Not everybody's getting along.  Also a tremendous amount of  imported material. 

 This is the burial, again, of a  young woman that you're looking  at.  Here are the arms drawn up near  the chest, wrapped with copper  beads.  She's buried with a collection  of daggers that were imported  from the Ohio River Valley in  Illinois of material that's not  made locally.  And they're so finely made that  you couldn't actually use them  without breaking.  They are things that are made  specifically for status items.  They could not be used in  everyday hunting activities or  everyday processing of game, but  they're the types of things you  could use in ceremonially  activities where you're trying  to convey status and prestige.  All of it imported material.  This is another burial with over  110 projectile points of  imported material.  And the photo down below shows  the excavation of a young child  with this group of imported  blades spilled out in sort of a  spiral design on top of the  grave.  It likely represents the passage  of time or movement of time or  the cyclical patterns of life  and death is one interpretation. 

 Some of the burials are human  remains that were cremated and  were sewn up in textile packets  that were wrapped in copper  beads.  These are all imported blades  made out of material from the  Ohio River Valley, again not  local.  One of my areas of interest is  studying the movement of  prehistoric exotica and how it's  used to convey status.  I once had a student who got  that confused and thought I was  an expert in prehistoric  erotica, which I know very  little about.  But this type of material tells  us about how far over distances  that people are interacting.  And it also tells us because  these are prestige items that  people are producing things that  are designed to convey status.  These are the equivalent I would  describe as Rolex watches.  These are things that people are  obtaining purely for the fact  that they're showing that this  family, this lineage, this group  has connections to trade that  not everyone has access to.  They have access to very special  materials.  And here's another group of  daggers in the ground. 

 we'll take a look at a close-up  of those.  These would have been on wooden  handheld shafts.  The white one is likely from  Illinois or Iowa, and the  blue-gray at the top is from the  Ohio River Valley.  Again, these are found in  Menominee County, Michigan.  The most amazing example of the  distance of interaction that  these people had is this item.  Does anybody know what this is?  My wife does because she's heard  me talk about it.  Somewhere in the back.  I want to ask Noah.  >> Obsidian.  >> Obsidian. 

 Do we have a lot of obsidian in  Wisconsin?  No.  It's volcanic glass.  This particular block the  University of Michigan  chemically fingerprinted from  Yellowstone.  And yet this was found in a  burial in the upper peninsula of  Michigan of a young woman  wrapped in a birch bark  container with several hundred  copper beads covered with this  red pigment.  This is an amazing find because  this material you could have  made into several dozen spear  points.  But the fact that this was an  exotic material, it is likely  that no one that lived in the  surrounding region for several  hundred miles had ever seen a  block of this translucent  volcanic glass this size before.  This is the kind of thing you  would bring out in a special  ceremony.  This is the kind of thing that  would be used in ritual  activities to demonstrate  long distance trade.  When it was discovered, the  archaeologists at Michigan  concluded that someone in  prehistory this early could not  have obtained something this far  away.  And so they immediately  interpreted this particular  burial as being something that  was more recent, a more recent  culture that had intruded in  terms of the burial of the site. 

 I was able to go through the  collections, and if you look  closely at the material here,  this is from the University of  Michigan, there is still leather  sinew or leather cord connecting  the beads that the copper has  preserved.  We were able to snip a piece of  that off, as well as a piece of  birch bark, and obtain  radiocarbon dates  of 800 and 500 BC.  So that means 2800 to 2500 years  ago, someone living in Menominee  County, Michigan, in the UP,  could have obtained an item from  Yellowstone without horses,  without wheeled vehicles, that  this would have had to have been  carried on someone's back or in  a bag or through watercraft that  distance.  And on the Great Plains you do  find copper that comes from the  Great Lakes region.  And if you map out there are  other forms of artifacts that I  didn't discuss.  That red dot in the middle  represents the location of  Riverside, the arrows represent  source to where the item was  discovered of raw material.  So by 1000 BC people in our  region had access to trade  covering half the continent.  And we're exchanging copper from  our region specifically to bring  in prestige items to Wisconsin.  If we look at the distribution  of grave goods, they're almost  entirely with young women and  children, and there is a lot of  prestige items, there's also  evidence of violence.  By 1000 BC, native societies  had developed competition,  warfare, fairly significant  warfare, long distance trade,  and societies where not everyone  was equal in terms of the  distribution of wealth  and status. 

 So the end slide here really  visualizes the patterns that  I've talked about.  The beginnings of the old copper  industry started out  predominately as tool  manufacture at about 6,000 years  ago and gradually shifted toward  ornaments and prestige items.  And as we see other cultural  changes, this slide represents  what we refer to as the woodland  tradition, the beginning of  mound construction,  horticulture, ceramic  technology, all starting about  2,000 years ago to 2,500 years  ago in our region.  If we look at cultures after  this timeframe, copper is used  predominately for ornaments.  There are still some tools used  but societies become complex,  and the copper itself has more  value in producing prestige  items than everyday subsistence  technology.  Much of what I've presented is  the result of going back and  looking at collections that were  recovered in the 1940s and '50s  and '60s analyzing using modern  techniques and asking different  types of questions.  It's a very strong argument of  why archaeologists save material  because I can tell you 20 years  from now there's going to be  another graduate student who's  getting a PhD who is going have  tremendously more information on  this than what I have because of  new techniques and new  methodologies to ask different  types of questions than what I  ask and what the people that  excavated these sites.  So thank you.  [APPLAUSE]