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Half Pint: Copper and Colonialism in North America with Lenore Thompson - Ep 32
590 Plays4 years ago
Archaeology and Ale is a monthly series of talks presented by Archaeology in the City, part of the University of Sheffield Archaeology Department’s outreach programme. Half Pint is a short interview-style format which we will be undertaking during the COVID-19 lockdown. In this first Half Pint interview, we welcome Dr Lenore Thompson speaking on copper production, indigenous communities, and colonialism in Northwestern North America. Having completed her PhD in 2019, Lenore is a researcher specialising in the use and production of copper by indigenous communities of northwestern America. She investigates artefact biographies and the impacts of culture contact as interpreted through changing production strategies of copper among the First Nations of the Northwest Coast of North America.
For more information about Archaeology in the City’s events and opportunities to get involved, please email [email protected] or visit our website at archinthecity.wordpress.com. You can also find us on Twitter (@archinthecity), Instagram (@archaeointhecity), or Facebook (@archinthecity)Affiliates
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Transcript
Introduction to Archaeology Podcast Network
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Introduction to Episode 32 and Halfpint Segment
00:00:28
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode 32 of the Archeology in Ale podcast and another segment of Halfpint. The podcast is brought to you by Archeology in the City, the community outreach program from the University of Sheffield's Department of Archeology.
Dr. Lenore Thompson's Research on Copper Production
00:00:42
Speaker
In this Halfpint, we have Dr. Lenore Thompson speaking to us about her recently completed PhD research about copper production on Canada's Pacific coast and interactions therein between indigenous and colonial people.
00:01:06
Speaker
My name is Lenore Thompson and I'm originally from a really tiny town in Alberta, Canada. I did my undergrad degree in Vancouver at UBC and then I worked as a professional archaeologist for about five years all along the coast of BC and in the interior. Pretty amazing and then eventually I decided to come and do my master's degree so I could
00:01:33
Speaker
to further my knowledge. And initially, I had meant to go to Sheffield, because it's got a really good reputation around the world, and learn some material science, things I could bring back to BC. And then all of my master's work in dissertation ended up turning into a PhD question. And so I ended up staying on to do a PhD at Sheffield.
00:02:01
Speaker
Tell us about your research project and what it hoped to accomplish. I was looking at the impacts of entanglements from cultural contact and colonialism that occurred on the northwest coast of North America when Europeans and Russians and then later Americans came to the area. And I was doing that by following copper metal and its use by the indigenous people living
00:02:29
Speaker
on the northwest coast and I chose copper for a very specific reason because the metal occurs naturally in the area. So it was collected and used by indigenous people prior to any Russians or Europeans there, you know, them coming physically to trade their material.
00:02:47
Speaker
Before any of that happened, naturally occurring native copper could be collected from green runoffs, from glaciers and mountains, and they could work it and make it into beads and tinkers and rings, all sorts of things.
00:03:06
Speaker
This material was important and had a prescribed meaning prior to any Europeans showing up and it remained important throughout that period and up until now.
Use of PXRF Technology in Research
00:03:19
Speaker
So and they continued using it. So I wanted to look at the different ways that they decided to use this material when it became what we thought was European trade medal. And if they decided to interact with it differently and how they use their material culture to mediate the world around them, how that might have changed through colonial periods.
00:03:44
Speaker
I understand that your research used PXRF technology. Could you tell us more about that and why it was so valuable
00:04:00
Speaker
shoot low level x-rays basically at the surface of something and excite the electrons and neutrons in the atoms. And based on what happens to those excited electrons and neutrons and protons,
00:04:17
Speaker
you can measure the types of elements in the material and what part per million or percent is there. The portable x-ray fluorescence device that I had, which looks like a big hair dryer, could point it directly at the copper that was used to make the artifacts and I could sample that material in a non-destructive way
00:04:41
Speaker
which is very important. There's no damage done to the artifacts. And I could tell what kind of elements were involved in the makeup of that metal. So if there was zinc, maybe it was a brass. If there was some tin, maybe it was a bronze. I could tell if it was leaded. So I could see if the metal was consistent with different things or consistent with the naturally occurring material, which only has
00:05:11
Speaker
a very tiny trace amount of maybe silver and iron in it from the northwest coast is a very specific chemical signature. And so I could tell if the metal was consistent. And the portable x-ray fluorescence device is only a surficial sampling technique because it only samples one tiny spot and it only penetrates the metal a few millimeters.
Chemical Characterization of Indigenous Artifacts
00:05:36
Speaker
You have to be very careful because you can accidentally sample some corrosion or get a concentration of lead inside the copper and think that there is more lead in the material as a whole.
00:05:56
Speaker
kind of careful using the device but you can make some pretty educated inferences about what the material is consistent with based on not destructive like mass spectrometry where the samples have to be burned so you can sample it over and over again without any negative damage on the artifact which is really nice. Tell us more about the project's methodology.
00:06:22
Speaker
Well, because naturally occurring copper has a very distinct chemical signature, I chemically characterized a bunch of over 300 indigenous artifacts created using copper through between the 1700s and 20th century. And that way I could track if the metal was consistent with naturally occurring native copper or manufactured metals.
00:06:52
Speaker
Because the indigenous people on the Northwest Coast chose to never smelt or melt metal, they never altered the chemical signature of the metal. So if there's any lead or zinc or tin or bismuth or nickel in the metal, suggesting it's an alloy or has been manufactured with different impurities that don't occur naturally on the Northwest Coast, then it's easy to identify as the metal being consistent with the trade metal.
Thompson's Background and Influence
00:07:21
Speaker
And that way I could tell if the indigenous people were choosing to only use naturally occurring metal or only use trade metal and how they applied those materials to make conspicuous, important, ceremonial and other artifacts throughout this period and see lots of upheaval. And I also coupled that with
00:07:49
Speaker
Sort of a really broad investigation of all of the literature, any available oral histories, primary documents from Russians and Europeans, traders, later colonists.
00:08:04
Speaker
ethnographic work, archaeological research, and then I sort of put it all together so I could make some sense of it and be able to tell a story about what's happening through that time. Lenore, during your time working and training as an archaeologist, was there anything that drew you to want to research this for your PhD?
00:08:23
Speaker
Well, I think growing up in Canada and having a lot of exposure to how living indigenous cultures are navigating the world today, what colonialism means in a colonized country is, it really drew me to the subject. And then when I went to university
Findings on Indigenous Metal Use
00:08:46
Speaker
and then became a field archaeologist, sort of opened my eyes to the
00:08:52
Speaker
world we live in and the ways that colonialism has impacted our decisions and things today. And so when I came to do my master's, I still had lots of questions about obviously the land that I lived in. And I had always wondered about
00:09:13
Speaker
metallography, archaeomaterials and at Sheffield there was the opportunity to study ancient metals and to continue on with my interest in the northwest coast and trying to
00:09:28
Speaker
figure out what sort of archaeological interests had been casually posed to me. There wasn't a lot of focus on metals when I was doing my undergrads. This sort of gave me a new way to investigate something that I have always been interested and passionate in. In the end, what do you feel you learned from your research about these indigenous cultures, about their interaction with Europeans, and about colonialism in general?
00:09:57
Speaker
Well, I guess what was surprising that I discovered was that the majority of the metal that I characterized was made out of manufactured metal from someplace else that wasn't naturally occurring material from the Northwest coast. And so that means that
00:10:20
Speaker
The material that I was looking at had a consistent way that people chose to use it. Once Europeans and Russians showed up, obviously the knowledge of smelting and melting came with them, but indigenous people chose not to use that technique.
00:10:47
Speaker
The amount of manufactured metal and the persistent use of indigenous traditional archaeo metallurgical techniques suggests that the copper had been used for a really long time prior to the European showing up, but that the trade metal had been in the area. Potentially, I have looked at some stuff that
00:11:13
Speaker
should be datable to contexts prior to any Europeans or Russians arriving in the air by 400 years. It's consistent with manufactured trade metals. So it's possible that the materials coming from drift copper and drift material from shipwrecks or from trade potentially as far away as China, traveling across Russia and across the Bering Strait and onto the Northwest coast.
00:11:43
Speaker
And this is something I'd like to pursue further. And then I guess probably the biggest lesson I learned from my research was that colonialism is much more
00:11:58
Speaker
of the patchwork of experiences than what we commonly think of it as.
Complex Colonial Interactions
00:12:06
Speaker
We think of it often as a dominant culture and for some reason a less dominant culture through technology or something and then one sort of crushing the other. What I found actually happened on the Northwest coast is that the indigenous people were
00:12:26
Speaker
living their lives. They weren't thinking about maintaining their heritage forever for children in perpetuity. They were making decisions that were good for them at the time that helped them navigate their world the way that they wanted to. For example, the missionaries were pretty interested in, pretty keen to teach Indigenous people English and have them speak English. And so this was for reasons to do with
00:12:56
Speaker
civilization, as far as the missionaries were concerned, but the indigenous people realized pretty quickly that taking advantage of that education and learning how to speak English gave them a stronger voice to argue for their own land rights. So actually, people are living in sort of patchwork of experiences, trying to do what they want to do to achieve their goals, not
00:13:21
Speaker
As simple as, you know, a strong colonial power coming in and taking over and I mean, the fact that you find indigenous and descendant cultures all over the world.
00:13:34
Speaker
still fighting for restitution and repatriation and that shows that this idea of a colonizer taking over is potentially a story told more by the winner. Yeah, not an actual truth.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:13:51
Speaker
I think that was probably the most important thing I learned.
00:13:54
Speaker
Thank you for listening to this archaeology and ale half pint. For more information about Lenore or her research, please visit the show notes which accompany this episode. And for more information about our podcast, please visit our page on the archaeology podcast network. You can get in touch with us at archaeology in the city on Facebook, WordPress, Instagram, or Twitter. If you have any questions or comments, we'd love to hear from you. See you next time.
00:14:27
Speaker
you
00:14:38
Speaker
This show is produced by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle, in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.