European Metals in Native Hands: Rethinking Technological Change, 1640-1683 (review)

A widely accepted historical interpretation of the first two centuries of contact between North American Indians and Europeans saw native peoples' own cultures disintegrated through an inevitable takeover by "superior" European technology and products. Today, a growing body of archaeological data gives us a better understanding of Native Americans' early interactions with Europeans. James Bradley and Terry Childs, among other scholars, have used material evidence to show that through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Indians of eastern North America converted European products and materials into the traditional forms common in their own cultures, and that their assimilation of exotic materials opened for them new options for traditional cultural expression. Kathleen Ehrhardt has now expanded the geographical scope of these studies to central North America. Her analysis uses evidence from the technical study of artifacts made from European metals by the Illinois people in the seventeenth century, evidence that shows how the Illinois adapted exotic trade goods to their own purposes and culture in place of the functions these goods would have had in European hands.

By 1640 the Illinois had entered a trading system with French suppliers of copper and brass kettles. Ehrhardt's documentary evidence shows us that the Illinois traded pelts and slaves they had captured from tribes to their south and west for metal goods. Her study of the material evidence reveals what the documentary records fail to tell us about Illinois material culture, namely the techniques used and products made with the imported metal acquired through this trade. Her material evidence is a sample of 800 copper-base items dating from the mid-seventeenth century that were excavated at the Illiniwek Village historic site in Missouri. These constitute a unique material-culture assemblage of European metal reworked by Illinois artisans into items that were primarily for personal adornment. The Illinois shaped sheet copper and brass into small decorative items by the hammering, folding, bending, and annealing techniques familiar to them from their previous experience working native copper. The availability of European-made sheet copper freed the Illinois artisans from the tedious labor of hammering out nodules of native copper into the thin sheet they wanted for their own metal products. They cut their sheet metal from European-made kettles, which they had adopted as an important component of ritualized gift giving among themselves and their trading partners. Ehrhardt sees the Illinois as using the European goods they acquired in their own way, not how the French in North America would use them, thereby shaping their own world as they wanted it.

Readers will find much of value in Ehrhardt's book beyond the story of the fate of French kettles in the hands of the Illinois craftsmen. Her work is a fine example of combining material and documentary evidence to gain insights into a culture that neither line of evidence alone could provide. The techniques of material analysis used—chemical and metallographic—are fully described. Chapter 4 gives us a new overview of pre-contact Native American material cultures, beginning with the Old Copper Culture that extended from 3000 through 1500 BCE. We learn how the Middle Woodland Period (200 BCE–400 CE) is characterized by a florescence of copper-metalworking techniques, particularly among the Hopewell people of Ohio. The Mississippian style of copper working extended from 900 CE into the period of European contact. Because of the long tradition of working native copper by hammering and annealing, the Illinois artisans had the technical skills that made European copper and brass immediately useful items for them to acquire. Since the French and Dutch traders in the interior of North America depended on Indian knowledge of survival and hunting techniques, the precursors to a genuine two-way exchange network were in place. Historians of technology will find Ehrhardt's chapter 2 a valuable review of the writings of anthropologists on the responses of peoples to techniques or materials originating in...