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Yukon archeologist Greg Hare says it was just luck that led him in 2016 to find a nearly 1,000-year-old hunting artifact, half exposed in a remote patch of ice.
Recent radiocarbon dating confirms that the arrow blade point is one of the earliest examples of copper metallurgy ever found in Yukon.
Hare was travelling with a documentary film crew over the ice patches near Carcross, Yukon, in July 2016 when they spotted some caribou on a hillside. Hare had been showing the crew some of sites where he and other archaeologists have been finding ancient First Nations hunting weapons over the last 20 years.
They were flying in two helicopters, and Hare's helicopter decided to land to get out of the film crew's shot. While waiting on the ice patch, Hare and his team spotted an antler arrow point half buried in the ice. It looked like it had just been fired from a bow.
Hare says it's made of a copper nugget and is 99.9 percent pure. It would have been locally found, he said.
originally posted by: intrptr
I was wondering about that "copper metallurgy" aspect.
Hare says it's made of a copper nugget and is 99.9 percent pure. It would have been locally found, he said.
Native Copper is a natural find, not refined and smelted from ore.
Hammering it into that shape would require more skill than simply knapping stone points, though.
A study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, documents the discovery of a metal bead and a belt buckle that date from between 1100 to 1300—a period of time when the Thule people, ancestors of the modern Inuit, inhabited the region.
This discovery shows that indigenous people in North America were likely interacting with the “Old World” from both sides of the continent, lead author of the study, H. Kory Cooper tells Smithsonian.com. On the east coast they traded with the Norse, while on the west coast they traded across the Bering Strait, he explains.
While the Thule people did occasionally work with native copper and some iron, they did not use alloys or molds. So the presence of these seemingly ordinary objects suggests that they must have come from outside the region and suggest that Alaskan trade with Asia could have begun as early as the 1100s.
Of particular importance was the tiny scrap of leather attached to the buckle, says Cooper. Without it, the team would not have been able to get dates for the artifacts.
And the bronze is not the only item linking the site to Asia. The researchers additionally found obsidian objects at the site that are traceable to the Anadyr River valley in Russia, which drains into the Bering Sea, reports Owen Jarus at Live Science.
These examples of Old Copper Culture copper items , show how hammered nativee copper is almost, very nearly always flat, and the impressions of the hammer stones can still be discerned.
The shape of thia point is far to regular and prismatic to be native copper.
Hare says it's made of a copper nugget and is 99.9 percent pure. It would have been locally found, he said.
Recent radiocarbon dating confirms that the arrow blade point is one of the earliest examples of copper metallurgy ever found in Yukon.