The Role of Functional Efficiency in the Decline of North America’s Copper Culture (8000–3000 BP): an Experimental, Ecological, and Evolutionary Approach

The copper-using cultures of North America’s Archaic Period (10,000–3000 BP) have long been an archaeological enigma. For millennia, Middle and Late Archaic hunter-gatherers (8000–3000 BP) around the Upper Great Lakes region made utilitarian implements out of copper, only for these items to decline in prominence and frequency as populations grew and social complexity increased during the Archaic to Woodland Transition. From a cultural evolutionary perspective, the trajectory of North America’s copper usage presents a conundrum, as it is generally assumed that “superior” tools, i.e., metals, will replace inferior ones, i.e., stone. For well over a century, scholars have pondered the reason for the demise of copper technology that was once a wide-spread phenomenon. To address this question, an extensive archaeological experimental program was conducted which compared replica copper tools (spear points, knife blades, and awls) to analogous ones made of stone or bone to assess whether relative functional efficiency contributed to the decline of utilitarian copper implements. Here, the results of this three-part research program are presented in concert with population dynamics and ecological change to paint a broader picture of the complex interrelationships between the social, ecological, and technological spheres of past human behaviors. The synthesis of these approaches reveals that functional explanations—derived from experimental archaeology placed in an evolutionary framework—can shed much light on the trajectory of metal use in the North American Great Lakes.