Wonderful Power: The Area's First Miners
By Marcia Goodrich
It’s been happening every summer. Dr. Susan Martin could set her
calendar by it.
“People stumbled into the Seaman Mineral Museum looking for information
on prehistoric copper,” she said. “The museum staff sent them
to me. There was no other avenue for good information on the subject.”
Now there is. With the publication of Martin’s new book, Wonderful
Power: The Story of Ancient Copper Working in the Lake Superior Basin,
anyone with a serious interest in the Keweenaw’s first copper miners
now has a definitive reference on the subject. Drawing from hundreds of
scientific and historical sources, Martin’s 286-page paperback covers
everything from ancient tools and technologies to modern myths and misinformation.
Surprisingly, writing a definitive reference is not the best way for
an academic to gain stature in her profession. “Some people think
that this is the kind of thing researchers do in their dotage,” she
said.
Rather than assemble the truest and best information on an interesting
subject, conventional academic wisdom said she should stick to crafting
original works, however arcane, for the critical audience of her peers.
An associate professor of archaeology in Michigan Tech’s Department
of Social Sciences, Martin is a long way from emerita status. Nevertheless,
she shrugged off the admonitions of those who knew better.
Her reasons transcend the traditional faculty concerns of promotion and
tenure. Beyond the laudable goal of informing the public, she hopes both
to debunk the reams of pseudoscience that have been published on ancient
copper mining and to protect a vulnerable resource.
“People come here to collect,” she said. “These artifacts
are very collectible, and that puts them at risk.”
A stone hammer or copper blade that’s dug up, polished, and put
on somebody’s shelf may be pretty and profitable. But yanking artifacts
out of their natural habitat is the archaeological equivalent of a train
wreck.
“The sites are under assault. Artifacts exist in a very delicate,
buried environment,” Martin said. “If that’s disrupted,
you lose the power of the information that depends on the setting.”
Archaeology’s challenges are daunting enough on their own. “For
example, we can’t tell if an artifact was buried intentionally or
just dropped. It’s a difficult puzzle to solve in the best of conditions,
and it’s especially hard with people collecting.”
As to where the artifacts end up, “I’m told they go to dealers
and that a lot of it goes to wealthy collectors,” she said. “They
don’t tell me the whole story because they know I’ll be upset.”
As she tells the reader of Wonderful Power, “I hope that you’ll
begin to gain the riches of understanding the scientific archaeology can
unlock, which are so much more precious than things alone.”
In prehistoric North America, copper was used in its unalloyed, native
state to make tools and ornaments over many millennia. But it was far
more than simply a raw material.
“We’ve known for many years, at least since the 17th century,
that native people had spiritual beliefs about copper,” Martin said.
“They told the Jesuits that it was a special material. . . . Wonderful
power was ascribed to it.”
The first inhabitants of the Lake Superior basin recognized a continuum
between the natural and the spiritual worlds, she said. Everything around
them was occupied by a manager, or manitou, and copper was inhabited by
one of the biggest, toughest manitous there was, the panther-snake Mishi
Bizi.
Mishi Bizi was in charge of all things underwater and underground, and
he sometimes appeared with horns, scales, and a tail of copper. “So
when you took copper, you had to make a deal with him,” Martin explains.
In part because of this spiritual association, “We see a persistent
regard for copper in the historical record.”
One thing you don’t see in the historical record is any evidence
that Great Lakes copper found its way to another continent.
“I hope to never hear from another person how the Phonecians invaded
North America,” Martin sighed. “But I guess that’s part
of my job.”
A body of work has arisen over the last 60 years intimating that the
first Lake Superior copper miners must have had assistance from other,
“more advanced” peoples, to discover and mine their copper.
“Some people claim that ancient Europeans came and helped,”
Martin said. “There’s no evidence for this belief. . . . It
doesn’t take heavy equipment to mine copper; it takes humans with
rocks.
“The pyramids took a lot of people and a lot of planning. In contrast,
the copper mining here is compatible with the efforts of a few people,
a few times a year, for thousands and thousands of years. I think it may
be hard for people to imagine that length of time, the flow of generations,
but that’s how copper was mined here.”
“I try to be diplomatic because I don’t want to alienate people,”
she said. “But the people who are perpetrating this idea, that Great
Lakes copper went to Turkey or ancient Egypt, are not adhering to the
principles of archaeology.”
Martin may never win over die-hard believers in Chariots of the Gods-style
imitation science. But she hopes to give an alternative to the intelligent
lay person interested in ancient copper working.
For more information about Tech’s program in Industrial Archaeology,
see the Web: http://www.social.mtu.edu/IA/iahm.html
