The ancient copper of Isle Royale

Genuine 4,500-year-old Indigenous copper mining, and the myths built on it

People were mining native copper on this Lake Superior island around 4,500 years ago, hammering it out of pits with beach cobbles, and thousands of those pits survive. It is some of the oldest metalworking anywhere in the Americas, and the copper travelled in trade for enormous distances. This has attracted a great deal of nonsense over the years about Bronze Age Europeans; the archaeology says Indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes, over millennia. The island is a national park, the pits are protected antiquities, and collecting is illegal.