No matter its source, copper was sacred to Hopewell

Ohio’s Hopewell culture was an explosion of art, architecture and ceremony that reverberated across eastern North America between about A.D. 1 and 400.

One of its hallmarks was the accumulation of large quantities of iconic works of art fashioned from raw materials at key earthwork centers from the four corners of their world. These rare and spiritually charged materials included large seashells from the Gulf of Mexico, mica from the southern Appalachian Mountains, and obsidian from the Rocky Mountains. By far the most abundant raw material used for Hopewell regalia was copper, long assumed to have been obtained from around Lake Superior.

New research by Mark Hill and Kevin Nolan of Ball State University, Mark Seeman of Kent State University, and Laure Dussubieux of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago is, however, changing our understanding of where the Hopewell got their copper. Published online last month in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, Hill and his coauthors used a technique that involved firing a laser at a copper artifact to dislodge a few molecules, which then could be analyzed to identify its chemical signature.

They studied 52 copper artifacts from six Ohio Hopewell sites, including the Hopewell Mound Group and Seip Mound, both of which are now part of Hopewell Culture National Historical Park. The artifacts included copper beads, breastplates and earspools.

Hill and his team compared the chemical signatures of these copper artifacts with the signatures of raw copper specimens collected from sources in the Lake Superior region and the southern Appalachian Mountains. They found that, as expected, the majority of the copper came from Lake Superior. Surprisingly, 21 percent came from southern Appalachia. So a significant proportion of the copper found at Ohio’s Hopewell ceremonial centers may have been taken there by the same people who delivered the mica.

Based on the new data, Hill and his co-authors conclude that there was nothing particularly sacred about Lake Superior copper. Instead, “native copper, regardless of source, seems to have been channeled along similar social and symbolic pathways.” This conclusion is consistent with some traditional American Indian beliefs associated with copper.

Theresa Smith, a professor of religious studies at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, in her book “The Island of the Anishinaabeg,” describes how the metal was viewed by the traditional Ojibwe. Regardless of where they found it, copper “was always held to be a sacred and powerful mineral.”

Smith quotes an account written by the 17th century Jesuit missionary ClaudeJean Allouez, who observed that native people in the region commonly possessed pieces of copper, which they believed were “presents which the gods dwelling beneath the waters have given them” and which could bring luck in hunting and fishing. These so-called “gods” were the Underwater Panther and the Great Serpent, powerful spirits who ruled the World Below.

If the Hopewell culture shared some version of these beliefs, then copper would have been a powerful, sacred material whether it came from Lake Superior or southern Appalachia. And beads and breastplates made from it would therefore have had an enhanced social and symbolic significance.