PRIMITIVE COPPER WORKING: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

Abstract

At a meeting of the Anthropological Society of Washington, held November 15, 1892, Mr. Warren K. Moorehead read a paper on " Singular Copper Objects from Ancient Mounds in Ohio." These objects were described as discovered by himself in great numbers in the so-called Hopewell group of mounds, while con-ducting explorations for Professor Putnam of the Anthropological Department of the Columbian Exposition. They consisted mainly of numerous figures, large and small, made of sheet copper. Many of them showed outlines and open-work cuttings of surprising regularity, neatness of finish, and intricacy of design. The plate-like figures were of nearly uniform thickness, but the thickness of individual specimens slightly varied. Although these speci-mens exhibited characteristic Indian modes of artistic treatment, it was thought that a primitive people like the so-called mound-builders, being unpossessed of a knowledge of smelting or of tools of iron or steel, could not have fashioned plates of such size and uniformity as many of those from which these objects had been made, merely with implements of stone. It was also believed that such a people, even if possessed of large, thin plates of copper, could not have cut them into patterns so elabo-rate, the lines of which were often as curved and complicated, yet as clean as scroll or stamped work. It was therefore sug-gested, in the discussion which followed the presentation of Mr. Moorehead's paper, that these objects were perhaps of European manufacture or, granting the art-work on them to have been native, that the copper plates from which they had been cut must have been of foreign make, since such large thin sheets of metal could only have been wrought by means of roller mills or stamping machines of hard metal. Having practically and thoroughly learned the art of metal-working as practiced by the Zufii Indians, having often seen and helped them make perfectly uniform plates as well as extremely 94 THE AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST. [Vol. VII. thin sheets of copper and silver by alternate hammering and annealing, then grinding with sandstone, first one face, then the other, to form uniform leaves of the metal, I joined in this dis-cussion, representing-that, whether foreign or not, none of the forms described by Mr. Moorehead were impossible of produc-tion by a people actually limited to the resources of the stone age, as the builders of these mounds are known to have been. To this statement Professor McGee, in summing up the first part of the discussion, as presiding member, was inclined, from per-sonal experience in metal-working, to agree; but it was objected by others that the mound people could hardly have possessed a knowledge of annealing, so essential to the process of copper-beating, etc., as described by me. Thus the question was left indeterminate.