1862.] Ill [Morlot. 



On the Date of the Copper Age in the United States. 

 By a. Morlot. 



The series of the Sinithsoniaii Confribufions to Knoiolcdge opens 

 with a splendid volume on the '' Ancient Monuments of the Missis- 

 sippi Valley," by Squier and Davis (Washington, 1848). In this 

 work, as glorious a monument of American science, as Bunker's Hill 

 is of American bravery, the authors have revealed the former exis- 

 tence, over a vast extent of the North American continent, of a most 

 singular civilization, characterized chiefly by the use of native copper, 

 derived from the district of Lake Superior, and spread, doubtlessly, 

 by commerce over the whole country. Hence we may call those 

 times the copper age of North America. The once prosperous civili- 

 zation of that age faded away, and left the field to the red man, in the 

 savage state in which he is still known to exist. Messrs Squier and 

 Davis have shown, that the virgin forests, growing on the earthworks 

 of the copper age, must have taken for their full development at least 

 one thousand years, and the Normans who visited x\merica eight cen- 

 turies ago, evidently only met there with savages. 



Some more light seems to be thrown on the date of the copper age, 

 by the fact recorded in Schoolcraft's Indian Tribes, Vol. I, page 103. 

 I have gone over the passage carefully, and I think the statement of 

 which I ara going to make use, bears inner evidence of being cor- 

 rect. Schoolcraft informs us, that at Beverly, twelve miles from 

 Dundas, Canada West, there were discovered about 1837, extensive 

 ossuaries, which he examined himself, and that among the bones 

 were found amulets of the red pipestone of Coteau des Prairies (Minne- 

 sota), copper bracelets like those of the old graves in the West, a 

 Pyrula s-pirata and a Pyrulapervena, both from the Gulf of Mexico, 

 four antique pipes used without stems, and corresponding with an 

 antique pipe from an ancient grave at Thunder Bay, Michigan, a 

 worked gorget of sea-shell, with red nacre, and shell-beads of the same 

 kind as those said to have been found in the gigantic mound of Grave 

 Creek, Virginia. All this goes to characterize the ossuaries of Be- 

 verly as belonging to the time of the mound-builders, that is, to the 

 copper age. But these ossuaries have also yielded some beads and 

 baldrics of glass and of colored enamel, figured by Schoolcraft on 

 Plate XXIV and XXV. The find is not single of its kind, for ac- 

 cording to Schoolcraft, beads agreeing completely with those of 

 Beverly, were found in 1817 in antique ladian graves at Hamburg, 



