Toward a functional understanding of the North American Old Copper Culture “technomic devolution”

North America's Old Copper Complex (4000-1000 B.C.) is a unique event in archaeologists' global understanding of prehistoric metallurgic evolution. For millennia, Middle and Late Archaic hunter-gatherers around the North American Upper Great Lakes region regularly 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...