Posted on 03/21/2021 8:16:36 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
Hunter-gatherers were also part-time farmers much earlier than archeologists used to beleive. They also traded more widely than archeologists used to beleive.
The best known agricultural tribe in what is now North Dakota is the Mandan, a Siouxian cousin tribe, that begin to arrive and grow corn, beans and squash around 1350 a.d. in the Knife River Valley.
But they weren't the first, just the largest and the most famous. Copper culture artifacts once thought unique to the Great Lakes Region and related to corn growing have been found elsewhere in North Dakota at least two centuries before the Mandan begin to arrive from the Ohio Valley.
There is no evidence that of any people not related to present groups. Clovis, Kennewick etc. are related to modern Native Americans.
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The prehistory of the Copper Country, long haunted by tales of a bygone race has yet to be told. Few Americans are even aware of the extensive mining activity that took place on Isle Royale in Lake Superior or along the Trap Range of the Upper Peninsula where approximately 500,000 tons of pure copper were mined out sometime between 1800 and 1200 B.C.
Curiously, the tablet and figurines were apparently destroyed.
I suppose you could say the same thing about anywhere on Earth.
Pounding a metal is no more metallurgy than carving a stick is carpentry. It’s about melting and mixing elements and reshaping them into a new form and kind.
There are a couple of interesting Great Lakes copper culture videos that have recently been uploaded to youtube. One focuses on the thousand+ prehistoric copper mines on Isle Royale and the other on carbon dating that takes the culture back 9,000+ years.
The Lake Superior Copper Mystery | Isle Royale |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWWqQ6eSvfo&t=2s&ab_channel=cf-apps7865
New Study ~ 9,500 Years Ago Great Lakes Copper Culture Started (Discussion of the Science Mag article linked in the thread headline)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iChHiLwqzU&ab_channel=cf-apps7865
I remember reading that some early US explorers of the West who were Welsh ancestry said they could communicate with the Mandan using Welsh.
Probably the work of Hrdlicka. Thanks for the pic!
I've read that president Thomas Jefferson told the Lewis & Clark Expedition not to come back with claims of light skinned people who 'understood' Welsh words. He was already fearful that other countries would lay claim to the western areas and that issue could complicate things.
"President Thomas Jefferson commissioned the expedition shortly after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 to explore and to map the newly acquired territory, to find a practical route across the western half of the continent, and to establish an American presence in this territory before European powers attempted to establish claims in the region."
It didn’t appear in Europe until after Columbus, so they blamed on indigenous North American’s... Whether it originated there... Who knows?
Did they blame the Climate Change of Olde on mankind as well?
Smelting, mining, industrial waste!
It may be purely coincidental, but there are other explanations as well.
If you care to explore that rabbit hole, you can put "Welsh Indians" into your search engine.
They would be ancestors of today’s. There’s no evidence that they were exterminated by some unknown group. Later cultures like those who built the mounds at Cahokia also used copper and made some fine copper artifacts- copper-covered ear spools, embossed copper plates, copper-covered box turtle shells, pressure flaking tools for working chert, etc. They traded for copper from the Great Lakes region, then fashioned the metal into art, and exported it for other items from afar, like micah, obsidian, and whelk shells.
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