Bull... Woodland, Hopewell and Mississippian cultures engaged in mining copper in Wisconsin. These cultures and earlier Native peoples had also engaged in serious mining of chert- in Ohio's High Ridge, in Illinois and its Mill Creek Chert region along the Mississippi River, and in other places. The pits and tunnels in Illinois and elsewhere are still there and their broken blanks and worn tools have been found throughout which identify the cultures that dug the pits. In the cases of both Chert and copper, select clays and pigments, all these people spent a considerable amount of effort at digging and relocating tons upon tons of material. In building their mounds, the Hopewell, Caddo and Mississippian people moved tons upon tons of selected clays, loess and sand as well. they were NOT merely looking for loose surface copper. This is just more of that 'Indians couldn't have built this or that' tripe from the early days of North American archeology, when it was thought that only whites could build anything. There was a time when archeologists couldn't bear the thought that the moundbuilding cultures that built Cahokia's Monks Mound could have been the same sort of 'lazy, irresponsible' people they knew as 'Indians.' They viewed the native cultures as inferior because by the time they came face-to-face with many of the interior tribes, introduced diseases (courtesey of Hernando DeSoto, perhaps), political turmoil, and pressure from shifting eastern nations had already done the work of destroying or drastically altering most of the interior cultures. In Cahokia's case, the original inhabitants had moved on long before the Illiniwek Cahokias, for whom Cahokia was named, set up house there... but the lithics and evidence doesn't point to any exotic people.
But this is one of the great - I hate to use the word conspiracy, but it certainly is suppressed evidence that American scholars have known about for more than 100 years that there was a huge copper mining enterprise in upper Michigan that lasted from 3,000 B. C. to 1,200 B. C. -
There is no conspiracy, and the Wisconsin copper sites are well known because they are the source for the copper used in the artifacts of the Mississippians and traded throughout the US southeast both raw and copper artifacts such as a copper box turtle found at the Mitchell Site northeast of St. Louis, where a considerable native copper industry had sprung up. Copper artifact making apparently went on at Cahokia. Both sites have areas where artifacts were found (are found) and show large work areas areas where the soil is literally stained by copper oxides, evidence of large amounts of copperwork being done. One such artifact was a sharktooth-effigy club or sword with a handle that had a base made of copper. Many, many items were traded, with copper being but one example. DeSoto reported on the huge size of the canoes used by the riverine peoples- and even by his time they had declined- these were trading cultures of genuine Native American 'redskins' who gathered in items from both the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, from Wisconsin, from the Rockies, from the Appalachians, etc, who wove fabulous textiles without the use of a decent loom, who used copper, stone, antler and shell tools, made microdrills, traded in shark teeth, conchs, fibers, bow wood, textiles, flint blanks, obsidian from the far west, etc. The copper miners were not 'Atlantians' - unless 'Atlantinas' were regular Native Americans like the Natchez.
This article's dates for the copper digs in Wisconsin appear to be way off!
I was going to ask you about your Indian mining dates. Aren't the Indian dates after the dates stated in the article? They give BC dates and I think you're dealing with AD dates with the Indians. Am I wrong?