Calling all Native American specialists!

I guess I'm not surprised to see that there aren't any posts in this particular forum given that there are not too many artifacts of Native Americans that are found with metal detectors.  That's actually what I was wondering.  If anyone has any knowledge about Native American history in relation to the use of metal, I would love to hear about it.  I just came back from vacation in West Texas and I'd be curious to know if there would be anything worth looking for with a detector when I go back.  I did find some nice pieces of pottery dating back about 1000 years and got some fantastic pictures of pictographs, some dating back 10,000 years!

Thanks in advance for any information any of you might have.

Cheers,
Dave 

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Thanks, outback!  I wasn't even thinking about jewelry!  Silly me.  I was thinking about weaponry and such.   I guess once firearms were introduced though it wouldn't have made sense to use metal spears or daggers.  And given there lack of experience in metalworking, anything they might have used would have been crafted by Europeans and traded for, huh? 


Interesting stuff.  Thanks, again.

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I did'nt know that.  That would be really cool to find!

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		Quote:			Posted by GoldDigger1950
	Native Americans did not have the ability to smelt metal from ore but they did use metals that were found as metal in its raw form like copper, silver and gold. All of those come as nuggets as well as ore.

  Ok so how do you explain these two which are not made of gold silver or copper but a metal these belong to my Mother who is a collector and  a archie,,The spear point is one she found on a dig and was dated to be 8000 year's old ,the 2 two arrowhead's one is broken were found in B.C Has well has the trade bead's The native's did learn quite a bit from the early  settler's ,         

 


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It's interesting to see the difference between the arrowheads found on the West Coast vs. traditional stone arrowheads found in the East.  I wonder if there was influence from Norse explorers or even people that traveled across the land bridge from Russia, or if they weren't made by indiginous people but a traded item made by people from distant lands.  I know I'm all over the place with the theories but I know virtually nothing about Native American history

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That's really cool that your mom is a hunter & collector of native artifacts - really cool. Grandmother, too. Neat finds.

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That makes sense, Tabdog.  I guess they didn't have the internet!!    Thank you for the info.  That sure is a beutiful find as well.  What part of the country did you find it?

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RelicRaiser and anyone else;

Yes the native Americans used copper quite a bit (Yellowknife, NW Territories is named for a copper knife) especially around the Great Lakes, where copper occurred in largish, workable, metal-form chunks. Of course, the  alloy is like a fingerprint and it has been found to have been traded as far as Mexico.

I was recently reading about some early explorer trading for a 10 pound chunk of the Great Lakes copper.

Copper was in use as far north as the Arctic ocean.

The difference in east coast and west coast stone artifacts is not trade or even from eastern Asia, its a matter of TIME. All up the west coast, into Alaska and across the Bering are found what is called micro blades, the larger arrow, spear and knife heads really migrated, as a technology, from the east coast.

I have watched three very interesting television series on it. It seems that a number of scientists are comparing early eastern points, as well as Clovis type points, to Solutrian points, from Ice Age western Europe, about 18,000 years ago. They feel the Solutrians (who disappeared from Europe) made their way across an existing ice bridge, in the mid Atlantic, much like the Inuit existed, before the advent of European culture.

All they have, to back their theory, is some very interesting, Solutrian-like points, dug up in the east, and which are dated at about 17,000 years. Also an ancient DNA factor, only found in Europeans, today, (and amongst the Ojibway, an Algonkian group but not derived recently,) in fact the DNA eggspurts think it arrived, in America, something like 16,000 to 18,000 years. Even the Vikings werent here, that early!

They think the stone technology spread across the American continent in a very brief time, archaeologicaly speaking.

Yes, one should be able to find copper knives, adornments (I wont say jewelry,) stored material for reworking, etc. Even early European trade goods had metal, such as axe blades and should be findable.

The farther south you go, the more metal there was, in the native culture, mainly gold, which was easy to work.

I would say finding a piece or two would be great but finding multiple occurrences would mean calling in archeological experts.

Brian AKA goldigger

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