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Posted: Thursday, February 5, 2009Faculty Author: Lisa Marie Anselmi
By Mary A. Durlak
Technology fascinates archaeologist Lisa Marie Anselmi, assistant professor of anthropology. In her book,Native Peoples Use of Copper-Based Metals in NE North America: Contact Period Interactions, she explores the different ways Native people used the metals they acquired through trading with Europeans.
The Barnes & Noble at Buffalo State Bookstore will host a book launching for Anselmi on Tuesday, February 10, during Bengal Pause. “With this book,” she said, “I hope to help people appreciate the metalworking industries of the First Nations. People used to think that Native people like the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat in Ontario learned how to work metal from Europeans. But they adapted their existing technological practices for native copper and bone to the new metals they acquired.”
Native Peoples Use of Copper-Based Metals, published in fall 2008, is the first stage of work that will probably take Anselmi the rest of her life. She received a 2007–2008 Provost’s Incentive Grant, which she used to investigate differing technological styles among the Native peoples of the Pacific Northwest. She is interested in comparing the metalworking technologies of Native peoples across all of North America, and she hopes that understanding the diverse technologies will add to the knowledge of precontact cultures as well as to later periods.
In the Northeast, Native Americans traded their goods for copper and brass kettles from the Europeans. Then they broke the kettles down with hand tools and hammer stones so that they could use the metals as raw materials to create objects they wanted. “Native people were not passive consumers of European goods,” said Anselmi. “They incorporated the new materials into their own cultures on their own terms.”
The technologies employed varied across time, from the earliest contact with European metal goods in the 1560s through the seventeenth century. Different groups used different technology and created differing objects, depending on their respective cultures. These multiple variations corroborate the idea that Native peoples’ metalworking technology was adapted within the context of individual cultural groups rather than copied from European practices.
Many ornamental objects such as bracelets were created; other objects were tools. “We describe objects along a scale ranging from utilitarian to ornamental,” said Anselmi. “It’s a valid way to describe things, but it’s important to remember that the distinctions we make are not necessarily the same distinctions the creators themselves would make.” For example, a pipe bowl lined with bright reddish copper may have had religious significance, suggesting the life-force of blood and renewal symbolized by the color red, and signifying more than mere decoration.
“We need to reevaluate the way we categorize and interpret the artifacts we find,” Anselmi said. “Many of the artifacts that have been defined as scrap were actually tools.”
Anselmi is not as interested in the artifacts as she is in the processes in which they were used and by which they were created. “Archaeology is the study of past cultures by looking at the materials they left behind,” she explained. “I believe that if you look at how they created and used the materials, you get closer to the people themselves.”
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