We have known for over a century just how large the copper mining industry was in Lake Superior It is completely insulting that academe has chosen to utterly ignore this fact. It easily supplied the whole global Bronze Age with native copper not demanding difficult smelting with reagents.
It is the only place on Earth that has so much. Again for a thousand years this copper made its way to the Irish sea and there they picked up tin. It was the currency of the Atlantean trade empire that emerged globally until smashed in 1159 BC.
Yet Academe keeps ignoring this when it is our most important fact .in prehistory from 3000BC through 1159BC. This item put the earliest exploitation even further back in time as it must by an additional 4000 years which takes it back to the earliest beginnings of post Ice Age Agriculture. If true, we have had access to some copper tooling during almost all our agricultural history. Certainly needed for sickles.
High Copper Technology Used in Ancient America
Posted on May 14, 2021 by AReditorialDept
https://atlantisrising.com/2021/05/14/high-copper-technology-used-in-ancient-america/?mc_cid=5ffa8830bd&mc_eid=0fbfc02f32
When it comes to pre-Columbian America, we know about the stone tools and flint arrowheads. After all, it was the ‘stone’ age. But what about copper? The natives, it turns out, could be handy in that medium too. A new study reveals that at least 9500 years ago—well before the copper working societies of the Middle East—native American cultures emerged in the Great Lakes area, that, by 6700 BCE, were using copper to make tools and weapons.
According to geologist David Pompeani at Kansas State University, a specialist in ancient mining, indigenous early Americans learned to harvest the ore and to heat and hammer it into arrowheads and other tools. The new research appears in the journal Radiocarbon
The suggestion that tribes of “hunter-gatherers” could be mining copper ore and using it in such a highly organized way is a heavy lift for mainstream science.
In March/April, 2015, Frank Joseph, editor of Ancient American Magazine highlighted orthodoxy’s dilemma for Atlantis Rising Magazine (#110). In “Copper Mining in Ancient America, Primitive of Industrial?” he explained, “Although archaeologists have been familiar with prehistoric copper mining at the Great Lakes since the mid-nineteenth century, they have always been reluctant to publicly discuss this enigma, because it suggests overseas’ impact on ancient America, thereby contradicting their unswerving belief in Christopher Columbus as the sole discoverer of our continent. They are unable to account for 223,215 or more tons of copper excavated from five thousand pit-mines, mostly at Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, beginning around seven thousand five hundred years ago.”
William P.F. Ferguson, an early and still-respected authority on North America’s ancient mining wrote “the work is of a colossal nature, and amounted to the turning over of the whole formation to its depth and moving many cubic acres—it would not be seriously extravagant to say cubic miles—of rock.”
The diggings extended over one hundred and fifty miles on the Lake Superior coast through three Michigan counties. Some five thousand ancient mines have been identified at the Great Lakes. If combined into a straight line, they would form a five-mile-long trench twenty feet wide and sixty feet deep. But such an excavation would result from all known pits. Until his death in 2009, a leading authority on the subject, Fred Rydholm, pointed out that nineteenth century farming and urban development obliterated most of the state’s prehistoric mines, which originally numbered at least twice as many. Each one yielded twelve hundred tons of ore for fifty-five tons of copper each.
Despite such evidence, academia yet clings to the notion that the copper mining activity was the work of hunter gatherers and no more. Michelle Bebber of Kent State University, Kent, who has studied the evidence commented on the new research. The dates confirm “that hunter-gatherers [were] highly innovative,” she says, and willing to “regularly experiment with novel materials.” The true scale of the operations went unmentioned.
Another mystery is also reported in the new research. About 3000 years ago, after thousands of years of advanced copper metallurgy, the natives suddenly abandoned their copper-making technology and returned to the more primitive methods of their much earlier ancestors—flint hammering, etc. Nobody is sure why, but some scholars believe that maybe the natives no longer saw any advantage in copper tools, finding them to be more trouble than they were worth—an attitude not unlike that of today’s academic research community toward the entire subject of pre-Columbian copper industry in North America.
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