| A longstanding problem in Late Protohistoric/Early Contact period research in the Western Great Lakes/Upper Mississippi Valley region of North America has been explaining the processes, contexts, tempo, and meanings of change in native material and cultural systems during the earliest phases of European influence. In this dissertation, I examine this problem from a technological perspective, investigating the early responses of one particular group, the late protohistoric Illinois, to the availability of European-introduced copper-base trade metal objects and materials. Challenging traditional ‘technocentric’ explanations for native material and cultural change, I implement a comprehensive approach to materials analysis which considers not only the technical, but also the behavioral, social, ideological, and historical dimensions of technological systems from materials selection through discard. In this way, I shed significant light on larger-scale questions of continuity and change in indigenous copper-base metalworking technologies and in the complex relations among material, technological, and social aspects of native cultural systems as new objects and ideas are drawn into them.; A complementary suite of documentary, archaeological, and laboratory methods is applied to a sample of 806 copper-base metal artifacts excavated from securely dated domestic contexts at the historically documented Iliniwek Village Historic Site, Clark County, Missouri to reveal the technological “style” of Illinois metalworking production and use. Metric and microscopic analyses of the total sample augmented by metallography and compositional analyses by PIXE and NAA of a selected 75-artifact subsample reveal that the Illinois were working European copper-base metal primarily and native copper secondarily. Sheet metal from imported kettles was reworked into artifacts of personal adornment using cold working, annealing, and to a lesser extent, hot working methods. Metalworkers do not appear to have preferred copper or brass in the manufacture of finished artifacts, but these materials are found to have been worked differently. Likely procured through native exchange networks and from early direct contacts with Europeans, the Illinois' appropriation of this “new” material was not need driven. Rather, it represented an additive component to the overall technological repertoire, impacting existing, yet already changing material, social, economic, and symbolic systems in important ways. |
