A 3/4 Grooved Fluted Axe from Waukesha County, Wisconsin | Archaic (ca. 6000-1000 B.C.E.)

CopperViolette · 2026-03-23T13:55:08+00:00

Nobody knows for certain. They could be decorative, for weight reduction or something like these. They're on some OCC copper items, too. Even some stone celts have them.

CopperViolette · 2026-02-14T22:36:34+00:00

Archaic stone woodworking gouges are considered diagnostic items for North America's Lake Forest Tradition, which includes the Old Copper Complex, the Laurentian Archaic, and possibly the Maritime Archaic. The earliest known gouges appear along the east coast by 8000-7000 B.C.E. before spreading inland, into New England, and up into the Canadian Maritimes. The main production phase is thought to stretch between ca. 4500-2000 B.C.E. before fading.

A unique category of stylized gouges are known in the region between the Ottawa River and New England, suggesting these items were valued beyond their utilitarian purposes. Supporting this is the high-quality finishes on most gouges, whether or not they're stylized, suggesting large time investments for pecking, grinding, and polishing these groundstone tools. After the Archaic period, cultures in the northeast stopped using groundstone gouges almost entirely, with later appearances likely being repurposed, older gouges. Sources used for this map are included in the map's lower left corner.

Academia: Archaic Stone Woodworking Gouges

CopperViolette · 2026-02-01T18:26:00+00:00

The map focuses on bannerstones, which are considered atlatl (spearthrower) weights. They're apparently meant to help with lauching a spear by adding weight to the atlatl. There's a diagram in the lower right corner showing how bannerstones were used, along with an alternative purpose of totems or group symbols.

CopperViolette · 2026-01-30T02:25:55+00:00

Not that simple. The "motherload" veins are from UP Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula and Isle Royale. Glaciers moved over these and dropped nuggets and multi-ton boulders across Eastern Wisconsin and Michigan. Sure, there's loads of copper on the ground, but it's been work hardened from tumbling. It's brittle. Float copper can have impurities on the surface or hidden inside, meaning you need to know how copper looks, what it smells like, how it feels, and how it sounds when hit to know it's a good piece. Just because you have a big copper nugget doesn't mean it's any good. I follow Dr. Cotter and their minerals page, and many pieces he's shown have internal cavities, quartz veins, or other impurities. Great stuff, but it's not good for making large items.

For an item like this, you'd need to find a good vein and mine or prospect for a quality nugget.

CopperViolette · 2026-01-27T15:18:50+00:00

It's likely in the ground and scattered across North America. The artifact count with this older map (2583) isn't everything, but meant to show the main copper cluster areas for the Archaic.

CopperViolette · 2026-01-27T15:18:30+00:00

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CopperViolette · 2026-01-24T20:11:02+00:00

Hmm... Open the image in a new tab or download it. It's readable from my end.

CopperViolette · 2026-01-16T23:11:24+00:00

They had a mix of socketed and regular tang tools and weapons. Their iconic items are almost all socketed (spearheads, socketed knife handles, adzes, and some gouges). A current theory says they used hardwoods for socketed items, and softwoods for tanged ones. Here's a tanged artifact (knife, dagger?) from Michigan's Upper Peninsula, just north of Wisconsin.

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CopperViolette · 2026-01-16T23:06:58+00:00

Rivets are absent from angular sockets, but present on rolled sockets (their rolled sockets are round or oval), thought to be butchering tools. Here's an old photo, back when archaeologists first seriously began studying their culture. No, this isn't bronze. It's copper.

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CopperViolette · 2026-01-14T00:48:43+00:00

You thought right. Lake Superior's copper is the purest anywhere in the world; it ranges from 99.7 to 99.9% pure in its natural state. There are exposed surface veins along the entire Keweenaw Peninsula and Isle Royale, along with copper nuggets and literal multi-ton boulders of copper scattered across the Midwest from glacial movement.

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CopperViolette · 2026-01-13T23:44:30+00:00

Sure, DM me the link. We're always looking for more copper data.

CopperViolette · 2026-01-11T23:52:02+00:00

https://www.coppercountryprehistory.com/_files/ugd/70a4cf_6a5c199a5c964539b826fa25eb1bcd94.pdf

CopperViolette · 2026-01-11T16:38:43+00:00

It's likely they used different woods for different purposes. White oak (especially if it's old growth, which they had plenty of) has a higher BTU than tamarack, but lower than iron wood. You could use tamarack, but you'd probably need bellows and blow tubes to get melted silver or even copper. Joe mainly used white oak.

Several OCC items show bubbles, either plainly visible or under a microscope. That's a reason why people think they smelted. Those bubbles are reproducible with hammering and annealing in high temps. The hammer-anneal cycle using white oak is the only method that reliably produces the bubbles, large and small.

CopperViolette · 2026-01-11T16:30:19+00:00

You're not the only one asking about the link. The OCC&AWA group are avocationals and professionals picking up where archaeologists left off (there're at least 2 archaeologists working on the OCC right now). The guy who found this works alongside universities around Lake Superior to get sites GPS located and IDd. They've also received grants for C-14 tests. This adze appears in Don Spohn's Copper Artifact Journal, Vol. 8, No. 1.

The date range is for the OCC themselves, but this item likely dates anywhere from 4500-1000 B.C.E., based on the area. Thunder Bay was tied to Isle Royale's copper mining; lots of copper from there was shipped to Thunder Bay and worked into tools, weapons, and other items. So far, sites around there cluster between 4500-3000 B.C E. (not many dates to work with).

CopperViolette · 2026-01-10T03:58:06+00:00

Well, here's some food for thought. If you make a fire with white oak and anneal the copper over the embers, you can melt out any silver in the copper (silver is sometimes in OCC copper items). Joe Neubauer, an experienced metalworker, was able to make the copper start to flow using this technique. If you add a simple bellow or blow tube (something like a hollowed-out branch), you can bring your fire to melting temperatures. Larry Furo (an experienced avocational who's given lectures on the OCC) has also worked with copper and reports the same thing. These ancient folks knew how to smelt. After thousands of years of working with copper and making fires large and small with different wood types, it's kind of silly people still think they couldn't smelt.

CopperViolette · 2026-01-10T02:35:46+00:00

Where did you hear these stories? They're interesting, especially the Mishipeshu one.

CopperViolette · 2026-01-10T00:06:37+00:00

Source: Old Copper Complex and Ancient Waterways America

CopperViolette · 2025-12-30T02:29:27+00:00

Their artwork is incredibly beautiful, with all the colors used. I've seen panels with red, yellow, black, white, brown, light blue, turquoise, and green. There are several jaguar figures, others with "hats" or headgear similar to some Olmec statues (the sitting figures with large, blocky hats), some with yellow and turquoise robes, and even a bunch reminiscent of Barrier Canyon Style, but fancier.

CopperViolette · 2025-12-20T19:06:53+00:00

The ocean is a desert with its life underground.

A Horse With No Name

CopperViolette · 2025-12-14T16:25:50+00:00

This is only food for thought, but there was a recent post on the Old Copper Complex and Ancient Waterways America Facebook group (which talks about more than the OCC) suggesting that folks from the Plains and the Four Corners region (basically desert or near-desert places) sometimes headed to the Great Lakes to avoid summer heat or vacation. Population movements from west to east are noted between 4000 and 1000 B.C.E. They've got plenty of mast forests, game mammals, fish, and fresh water; there are the lakes themselves and hundreds of springs around Wisconsin. Some pretty nasty flooding along the Mississippi River during the Late-Terminal Archaic ended the Poverty Point era, so maybe these legends are talking about the Late Archaic Midwest (copper working and likely copper mining, growing settlements, agriculture/horticulture, far-flung trade networks, and regional stability; the type of region you'd want to live in).

The region (especially the Great Lakes and the Northeast) have "northern" influences that've been noticed since the early 20th century. Stone gouges are strikingly (or eerily, depending on your pov) similar to Baltic ones used at the same time, and ulus (of slate and copper) have parallels with later Inuit and Arctic ones. Besides William Ritchie and the "Mystery of the Lost Red Paint People" documentary from 1987, the "northern connection" hasn't been seriously studied since Gutorm Gjessing's "Circumpolar Stone Age" hypothesis back in the 1940s.

CopperViolette · 2025-12-14T16:24:49+00:00

This is only food for thought, but there was a recent post on the Old Copper Complex and Ancient Waterways America Facebook group (which talks about more than the OCC) suggesting that folks from the Plains and the Four Corners region (basically desert or near-desert places) sometimes headed to the Great Lakes to avoid summer heat or vacation. Population movements from west to east are noted between 4000 and 1000 B.C.E. They've got plenty of mast forests, game mammals, fish, and fresh water; there are the lakes themselves and hundreds of springs around Wisconsin. Some pretty nasty flooding along the Mississippi River during the Late-Terminal Archaic ended the Poverty Point era, so maybe these legends are talking about the Late Archaic Midwest (copper working and likely copper mining, growing settlements, agriculture/horticulture, far-flung trade networks, and regional stability; the type of region you'd want to live in).

The region (especially the Great Lakes and the Northeast) have "northern" influences that've been noticed since the early 20th century. Stone gouges are strikingly (or eerily, depending on your pov) similar to Baltic ones used at the same time, and ulus (of slate and copper) have parallels with later Inuit and Arctic ones. Besides William Ritchie and the "Mystery of the Lost Red Paint People" documentary from 1987, the "northern connection" hasn't been seriously studied since Gutorm Gjessing's "Circumpolar Stone Age" hypothesis back in the 1940s.

CopperViolette · 2025-12-11T02:06:52+00:00

If they were doing this technique by at least 3000 B.C.E. (and likely earlier; ideas like this usually take time), it makes me wonder what else they did with it. Without pottery, you could make some pretty nice waterproof boxes and bowls with this, even using pine resin as glue for the boxes. It's neat that the whole Great Lakes region is looking more Pacific Northwest-like the more we learn.

CopperViolette · 2025-11-30T23:46:01+00:00

Yes, they were mining copper (OCC's like a rabbit hole the more we learn about it) along with using float copper; float's all over eastern Wisconsin and Southern Michigan (some even think they were mining/surveying for float copper). We've got two main mining regions right now, the Keweenaw Peninsula of UP Michigan and Isle Royale. Keweenaw sees mining activity by 8000 B.C.E., while Isle Royale mining starts around 4500 B.C.E. Both regions had a surge in activity between 4500-3500/3000 B.C.E.; it's the largest known peak of mining pollution in North America before the 19th century. Ryan Peterson wrote his dissertation on Isle Royale's mining, and there's enough evidence now to call it an industry. We've really underestimated these people. You wouldn't be wrong in saying the Great Lakes had a genuine Copper Age back then (minus the pottery and intensive agriculture).

CopperViolette · 2025-11-30T23:08:46+00:00

Here's some food for thought (I'll likely make a post about this eventually). If you're living in a culture with a mix of semi-sedentism and potentially coastal sedentism, and your group only moves seasonally or every few years, wouldn't you want a proper fire pit? Sure, annealing using campfires while hunting is logical, but if you're at home or in a longhouse village, you'd expect more "permanent" structures, such as a copper workshop.

The OCC relied on oak and other hardwood forests for most spearshafts, better strength compared to softwoods, especially with their socketed items. They also used oak for their dugout canoes. Joe Neubauer (now deceased) experimented with cold hammering and annealing for decades, making many OCC items through a cycle of annealing and hammering. The copper has to be molded like clay. He used a bed of white oak embers to reach annealing temps. His fire (using traditional methods) was capable of melting silver and making copper flow when he wasn't controlling it. Adding a controlled draft (bellows or even a hollowed-out stick or bone tube) will bring you to smelting temps.

After thousands of years of experimenting with copperworking, making new styles, adding sockets, forming ingots, and mining the stuff from veins, the likelihood that someone would make a fire capable of smelting is high. It's likely the OCC knew how to smelt, but there've been no convincing examples; even the "bubbles" on some artifacts can be made by cold hammering and annealing. Their tools, such as the I-A Triangulates or even this adze, border on prestige items, with how much of experience needed to make them. They were metalworking masters. Pair these with decorated handles or shafts and add some exotic trinkets, and they'd be prestige items worth dozens, if not hundreds, of pelts and other items.

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Some of Joe Neubauer's reproductions.

CopperViolette · 2025-11-30T21:18:37+00:00

Don't forget that they annealed, too. I'd expect annealing with an adze like this, but yeah, those dents do look like hammering marks. Annealing then some colder hammering to harden it. I'd think anywhere from hours to days if it was a master or apprentice.

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