Toward a functional understanding of the North American Old Copper Culture “technomic devolution”

North America's Old Copper Complex (4000-1000 B.C.) is a unique event in archaeologists' global understanding of prehistoric metallurgic evolution. For millennia, Middle and Late Archaic hunter-gatherers around the North American Upper Great Lakes region regularly made utilitarian implements out of copper, only for these items to decline in prominence and frequency as populations grew and social complexity increased during the Archaic to Woodland Transition. Yet, it may be reasonably asked whether these demographic and social factors are the only, or predominant, factors contributing to this evolutionary pattern. To answer this question, we initiated an extensive archaeological experimental program comparing replica copper tools versus analogous ones made of stone or bone ones to better understand whether relative functional efficiency also contributed to the decline of utilitarian copper implements. We present here the first of these experiments, a controlled ballistics study that examined how well copper projectile points penetrated a target relative to stone points. Our results showed that on average, copper projectile points did not penetrate our experimental target significantly shallower than stone ones; indeed, when mass is controlled there is evidence that copper points can penetrate substantially deeper. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that functional efficiency did not play a role in the decline of utilitarian tools at the end of the Old Copper Culture, although future assessments of functional efficiency should consider the role, costs, and benefits of production efficiency and skill acquisition in copper- and stone-tool making.