\"Style\" in Crafting Hybrid Material Culture on the Fringes of Empire: An Example from the Native...

16. “Style”inCraftingHybridMaterialCultureontheFringesofEmpire:AnExamplefromtheNativeNorthAmericanMidcontinent

Kathleen L. Ehrhardt

Abstract: In northeastern North America, early (sixteenth- and seventeenth-century) encounters between native peoples and Europeans were accompa-nied by exchanges of foreign materials and objects that were of immediate and lasting interest to native consumers. Goods moved into the interior with surprising rapidity, appearing in the Mississippi valley well before Europeans themselves arrived. In this essay, I examine the social dynamics of native ap-propriation of foreign material culture, specifically copper-base metals, into their own systems. I posit that the artifacts that resulted from these exchanges and the processes through which they were reconceptualized and made useful in native eyes are examples of material culture hybridity and hybridization. I suggest that a technological “systems” framework and technological “style” approach are well suited to the study of these processes in culture contact situ-ations. Analyzing the distribution of almost 1,400 pieces of European-derived copper-base metal and objects made from it over excavated areas of the Ilini-wek Village site, a large mid-to-late-seventeenth-century Illinois settlement on the Des Moines River (Clark County, Missouri), I explore the technological and social organization of crafting activity there. I identify domestic kin-based production and specialization manifested as skilled crafting as two important themes that figure prominently in the local transformation of European metals to ornamentation and the incorporation of these special types of hybrid material objects into everyday and specialized use contexts. This research provides one example of how hybrid cultural forms emerge and are consumed in situations of early native/European intercultural en-tanglement rather than in conditions of full-blown colonialism. It situates native

The Archaeology of Hybrid Material Culture, edited by Jeb J. Card. Center for Archaeological Inves-tigations, Occasional Paper No. 39. © 2013 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University. All rights reserved. ISBN 978-0-88104-096-8.

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peoples’ early intercultural interactions (however indirect) and their early ma-terial outcomes in relation to the level of influence particular colonial systems were actually able to exert on the colonial frontier and allows for interrogation of such concepts as acculturation, syncretization, agency, and material and social (re)production during this critical period.

Introduction

Despite the precarious state of their settlements in the lower St. Law-rence Valley, in the 1650s, the French turned their attention to the western Great Lakes (Figure 16-1). Their goals were to find a new route to China and new sources of furs and raw materials. They also sought new political alliances with native peoples, and new souls to convert to Christianity. Over the next decade, they would pursue these initiatives in earnest. By 1670, several small Jesuit mission outposts, which would double as headquarters for subsequent forays into the unexplored interior, were established in what were believed to be strategic locations west of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan at (what is now) Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and at Chequamegon Bay and Green Bay, Wisconsin. The French would call this north-ern country the pays d’en haut or “upper country.” Of the numerous and diverse groups of native peoples who inhabited the region at the time, perhaps relatively few had ever actually seen white people, having encountered them either at the growing settlements and trading centers of the St. Lawrence valley or through the rare appearances of illicit coureurs de bois (bush runners) who may have been engaged in illegal trade in the interior. Many more, however, had already felt di-rectly or indirectly the repercussions of actions and events farther to the east whose causes could ultimately be attributed to escalating European activity. Disruptions were social, political, and material in nature. According to ethnohistorian Richard White (1991:xi–xii, 11, 15), by the turn of the mid-seventeenth century, the lands between Lake Michigan and Lake Superior were becoming a “land of refugees,” a “hodgepodge of people.” Remnant native populations (both Algonquian and Iroquoian), recently displaced by bloody and relentless Iroquoian aggressions on their homelands in Huronia and surrounding Lake Erie, sought refuge there and came to share lands and even village settlements with each other and with already present indigenous occupants (Algonquians and Siouans) who were yet to experience firsthand the effects of Europeans in their midst. Even before midcentury, however, native peoples of the upper country were inhabiting a changing material world. It is now commonly accepted by archae-ologists that European products such as copper-base metals (kettles), knives, and glass beads, for example, had reached and moved among native peoples in the western Great Lakes long before Europeans themselves arrived (Ehrhardt 2005; Gosden 2004:85; Kardulias 2007; Mason 1986:211–212). Exactly how long before is largely a matter of speculation; some researchers suggest that foreign objects and materials may have been present on protohistoric sites in the interior as early as 1600 and certainly by the end of the first quarter of the century in the western lakes (Drooker 1996; Lurie and Ehrhardt 2010; Mazrim and Esarey 2007).

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Understanding the processes through which native peoples acquired Eu-ropean objects and materials at this early time, what they did with them once they got them, and how having these objects may have affected their subsequent actions and their ways of life are questions that have long intrigued archaeolo-gists. As the restrictive grip of mid-twentieth-century acculturation models has loosened, archaeologists have come to view the complex relations among native

Figure16-1. Map showing the Iliniwek Village (or Haas-Hagerman site [23CK116]) and locations of native groups with reference to major French installations from the mid-to-late seventeenth century through the beginning of the eighteenth century.

material culture choices, material culture change, and social change in contexts of European contact in fruitful and instructive new ways, both at broader scales and at the level of individual cultures. We now explore these concepts in terms of the dynamics of migration, diaspora, transculturation, creolization, metissage/mestizaje, hybridization, and ethnogenesis, and develop themes related to identity, agency, resistance, persistence, decision making, even individualism to name just a few. We speak of material culture in terms of materiality, material habitus, social biog-raphy, commoditization, alienability, symbolization, and hybridity (see Meskell 2005; Taylor 2008; Turgeon 1997). Importantly, in recent years, and undoubtedly influenced by the rise in popularity of postcolonial theory and critique in literary studies, archaeologists have become interested in interrogating traditional (read Western-centric) narratives surrounding how “contact” has been represented in colonial experience and in reevaluating the important social role that material culture and material culture change played in colonial/native engagement (see Gosden 2004:5; Jordan 2009; Lyons and Papadopoulos 2002; Preucel and Cipolla 2008:138; Silliman 2005:60; van Dommelen 2006). The present study illuminates important social aspects of foreign material consumption and social change at contact in Native American societies in the midcontinent. My goal is to reveal how, why, and in what changing historical conditions new materials were first appropriated into native social, economic, and political spheres, and to understand more clearly what role(s) these materials played in bringing about social change within their communities. Once drawn into particular societies, foreign objects, parts of objects, or materials from which objects were originally manufactured were manipulated, possibly modified into new objects, and distributed in many different, often creative ways. Long before entering these new contexts, objects and their meanings and purpose had become “mutable” in the sense that their meanings could and did shift through a “succes-sion of uses and recontextualizations” depending on the social arena(s) in which they performed (Thomas 1991:29). The “value” of various materials and objects was continually being set and reset by social groups according to these objects’ perceived significance in particular social worlds. I argue here that these absorp-tions, appropriations, and transformations in appearance, meaning, and value result in what can be interpreted as “hybrid” material culture forms and that the material, technological, and social processes that surround their creation and use can be understood as “hybridization” (after Friedman 1997:88, cited in van Dom-melen 2006:119). Native consumption of European-produced copper-base metals (primarily copper and brass) is a primary example of this process. Among other uses, such metals are found frequently in the archaeological record transformed into personal adornment and ornamentation items. My purpose here is to address the social dimensions of the production of hybrid copper-base metal artifacts among one specific group, the protohistoric Illinois. I focus on these processes as “crafting,” and explore them in terms of the organization of production and of specialization as it might manifest in small-scale societies in situations of early culture contact. I offer an approach to analysis of these situations that can be applied beyond

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this research, and evaluate the overall usefulness of the concept of hybridity as it applies to material culture change in contact situations. The approach I adopt in this study views native technologies, and the objects and materials of which they are a part, to be viewed as open, socially unbounded, stylistic “systems.” It considers the entire life histories of objects, and takes in the entire range of native technological knowledge, behavior, and social activity associated with material acquisition, design, manufacture, distribution, recep-tion, perception, use, potential redistribution in new use contexts, and even final discard (after Kingery 1993:219). It recognizes that any of these dimensions are fluid, especially in arenas of changing social action, agency, and social reproduc-tion. In this way, I move past simply characterizing objects or sets of objects as hybrid based on recognition of the origins of their various parts and recombined structure (see Counts 2008:5) into a more productive analytical and interpretive realm that queries how these objects were actually made and used. By tracing the processes through which material culture objects or materials actually become hybrid, we are better situated to decipher the roles they played and meanings they assumed in the changing or changed worlds of native consumption of foreign materials. This approach is demonstrated using the material culture repertoire of the Illinois, a large group of western Great Lakes/Prairie Algonquians who inhabited a vast area extending west and south of Lake Michigan through the mid-to-late-seventeenth century. Initially, the Illinois engaged first in long-distance, down-the-line trade, probably with the French. This was followed by intermittent face-to-face interaction at fairly long distance, then by direct exchange in their own territories, particularly with French missionaries and entrepreneurs who entered the region in the 1660s. Through exchange of captives, pelts, and skins, the Illinois acquired and consumed (among a narrow range of other objects) European-derived cop-per and brass kettles or sheet metal already cut from kettles. They converted the raw material into small objects of personal adornment and ornamentation using traditional metalworking techniques long known in prehistory. Here, I am particularly interested in integrating what I have already learned about how and why copper-base metal was acquired by the Illinois and how it was transformed technologically by them into body ornamentation with what can be learned about the organization of production and consumption from its distribution across one of their large settlements. The data set used in this study is derived from excavations at “Peouarea,” now known as the Iliniwek Village site (also the Haas/Hagerman site [23CK116]), in Clark County, Missouri (Figure 16-2). The site is a cluster of three roughly spatially contiguous villages known from contemporary sources and archaeological inves-tigations to have been occupied by about 8,000 Illinois circa 1640–1683 (Ehrhardt 2005; Thwaites 1896–1901:59:113–137). About 1 percent of the total assemblage is made up of trade materials, which occur in the same contexts as traditional objects made of stone, osseous materials, and clay. The range of trade materials is limited, consisting of copper-base metal, glass beads, iron knife blades and other ferrous remains, four pieces of gun paraphernalia, and several lead musket balls.

Figure16-2. Location of the Iliniwek Village (23CK116) with the study area contexts outlined.

“Hybridity”asaDescriptiveTermandAnalyticalConceptinSituationsofEarlyCultureContact

That the Illinois used traditional native metalworking techniques to convert imported European-derived copper-base metals into objects of personal adornment is an example of material culture hybridity or hybridization may at first appear self-evident, but I argue here that it is necessary to situate the meaning(s) of the term and qualify its application not only to the Illinois materials but also to

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other native North American Eastern Woodlands material assemblages that result from conditions of early intercultural contact. It is challenging to do so, given the variety of applications of the term. Cultural theorist and critic John Hutnyk (2005:80) observes that “hybridity has come to mean all sorts of things to do with mixing and combination in the moment of cultural exchange.” Intercultural inter-ludes, however fleeting or transient, can and do result in mixing of people, ideas, symbols, values, and things on a “middle ground” or even a “native ground” of social conjuncture (Du Val 2006; Gosden 2004; Thomas 1991; White 1991). In postcolonial discourse, the term hybridity has enjoyed most widespread (but not exclusive) application in studies of full-blown colonialism in which rela-tions between “host” or “colonized” (read indigenous peoples) and “colonizer” (settler) are long term and have become well established. Such conditions involve full-scale settlement, governance, and/or some form of domination or exercise of power differential. Ethnic, racial, and resource differences between colonizer and the host as “other” are emphasized (Rowlands 1998; Silliman 2005:58; van Dommelen 2006:110-111, 118–119). Stephen Silliman (2005:59) has asserted that within these communities, creative responses arise among indigenous (subju-gated) peoples who “never permit these processes to become final and complete and who frequently retain or remake identities and traditions in the face of often-brutal conditions.” These new or developing identities or cultural forms and the sociopolitics that surround them were frequently recognized and manifested through the inventive, expressive creation of hybrid material culture (see also Liebmann 2008:5; van Dommelin 2006:110–111, 118–120). Even so, Noah Thomas (2007:208–210) argues that some uses of the term hybridity, actually “flatten” layers of difference while working in a paradoxical, unstated way to emphasize them, and in some ways imply homogenization and syncretism in what otherwise may truly be quite complex and dynamic situations. Using Hutnyk’s definition, divested as it is of any restricted application to conditions of long-term colonial transcultural entrenchments or association with manifestations of resistance, we see that examples of hybridity and hybridiza-tion of ideas and things can result from instances of less intense, shorter-term, or intermittent engagement, as in earlier or less invasive phases of certain European expansionist endeavors. Such situations, which are most readily visible at frontier boundaries, brought two distinctly “different” peoples together in social engage-ments and material exchanges that were not controlled or dominated by one party or the other. Their outcomes were largely unpredictable, but as Matthew Liebmann (2008:6) points out, they had the potential to disconcert and transfigure. In these encounters, native peoples and Europeans learned enough about each other to communicate, negotiate, and even dress so as to facilitate and complete interactions in a diplomatically successful and economically profitable manner for both sides (White 1991). In the initial phases of engagement, native peoples undoubtedly accepted trade goods as gifts in ritualized gestures of generosity and good will as part of diplomatic exchanges with Europeans or other native peoples as well as in trade for native products. Encounters became social, diplomatic, economic, and ritualized marketplaces where often-eager native consumers drew in certain

kinds of objects, materials, even ideas according to their own desires, preferences, or special interests. Although native inclinations to accrue foreign goods are undisputed and sure-ly increased over time, consumption was not compelled or coerced. Native groups were far from dependent or reliant consumers (Brown 2004:159–160; Ehrhardt 2005; White 1991). In these early circumstances, native autonomy, sovereignty, and identity remained intact. Although many groups made early alliances with Europeans that would eventually open their territories to further white intrusion and deepen their mutual entanglements, native peoples were not immediately and irrevocably “sucked into” a wider world system imposed on them through aggressive or oppressive machinations of the particular European groups with whom they interacted (Du Val 2006:8; Ehrhardt 2005:194–195). While each national tradition had its own priorities and agendas, it has long been acknowledged that during the initial phases of interaction, none of the major foreign powers (Dutch, English, French) operating in the northeastern Woodlands had the resources or the coercive power to subjugate native peoples (see Dietler 1998:298; Gosden 2004:26; Kardulias 2007; Silliman 2005). By the mid-seventeenth century, however, the es-tablishment of more permanent European colonial settlements did lead to efforts to dominate some resident native groups in the northeast (Rubertone 1989). These efforts escalated in the nineteenth century, when American interests prevailed and new attitudes developed toward Native Americans that led to disastrous results for indigenous groups (Silliman 2005:59; see also Du Val 2006). In the social contexts of early trade and diplomacy, Native Americans were exposed to European products and materials and selectively acquired certain types, appropriating them for their own purposes and giving them new meanings. Some European objects, like knives and awls, were used in utilitarian spheres as functional replacements for native counterparts (Branstner 1992). However, the uses to which many types of items were put were often far removed from those intended in their original manufacture (Anselmi 2008; Bradley 1987; Ehrhardt 2005; Hamell 1983, 1986; Turgeon 2004; van Dommelen 2006). Gun barrels were turned into scrapers, and metal from kettles was cut, bent, and transformed into useful things like arrow points and ornaments. Glass beads, admired for their color, luster, and associative cosmological qualities, were incorporated into body and clothing ornamentation. Many types of trade goods, altered or unaltered, were placed in graves as accoutrements or as gifts for the dead (Cleland 1971; Denys 1908 cited in Martin 1975:115; Kenyon 1982; Mason 1986). Newly appropriated objects fre-quently served multiple purposes in various social and ideological realms, perhaps becoming prestige objects worn or presented only in ritual contexts or reserved for other specialized use or purpose. In addition, at least in the earliest phases of interaction, some types of objects may have retained the exotic qualities native people associated with their original makers, like “foreignness,” “other worldli-ness,” or cosmological “power” (Hamell 1983, 1986; Helms 1993). In a very real sense then, these objects and the technologies that accompany their material transformations and their use may appropriately be termed “hy-brid” because materials and/or technologies from different sources are selectively

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combined or incorporated in creative ways to form newly translated (sensu Hutnyk 2005:81) objects onto which traditional meanings and values are transferred and/or new ones engendered. Foreign objects that remain unaltered and are used either in traditional or new ways or for new or familiar purposes may also be thought of as hybrid. Importantly, their uses, value(s), and meanings “fit”; that is, they are comprehensible within the sensibilities and social or cosmological lives of their makers and users. Paramount here is the notion that meanings, uses, and choices never remained stagnant or became syncretized in this dynamic, moving material world; all objects, both traditional and new, appear to have been in a seemingly constant state of play. Just how this process unfolds at the scale of an individual culture is of inter-est here. I take up this question first in a general sense and then more specifically, using the copper-base metal industry from the mid-seventeenth-century Iliniwek Village.

ProducingHybridObjectsofImportedCopper-BaseMetal

Why Copper? Copper has a long history as an exotic, prestige material among native peoples of northeastern North America (Anselmi 2004a; Ehrhardt 2009; Levine 1996; Martin 1999; Winters 1968). When copper-base metal from European sources appears in the Northeast in the sixteenth century and somewhat later in the mid-continent, it occurs primarily in the form of copper (base metal) or brass (an alloy of copper and zinc), but latten,1 bronze (an alloy of copper and tin), and gunmetal (an alloy of copper, zinc, tin, and lead) objects have also been identified (Mason and Ehrhardt 2009). Copper metals are found most frequently in the form of kettles, bells, pins, needles, awls, finger rings, and decorative gun parts (Turgeon 1997:5). George Hamell (1986:75–77) has argued that native desire for foreign goods, including copper, was “ideationally premised and aesthetically motivated.” He claims that when European-manufactured copper became available in the contact period, native peoples recognized and interpreted it as a material manifesting within the color red, reflecting already-familiar concepts and symbolic themes of value (as material substance), wealth and well-being (in the sense of medicine), and “other-worldliness.” For northeastern peoples, “redness” was associated with the animate and emotive aspect of life and of power. The nature of the color red was ambivalent; it could be positive when it connoted life in contrast to death, or nega-tive/destructive when connoting hostility rather than harmony (Hamell 1986:76; Turgeon 1997:9). For northeastern Woodlands peoples, copper was derived from the mythical “underwater world,” located at waters’ edges, whirlpools, and wa-terfalls situated well outside village clearings. Copper was supplied and curated by man-beings or horned or antlered serpents, panthers, and dragons. Copper could be bestowed from these grandfathers or could be consecrated to them in ritual exchange sacrifices (Hamell 1986:78–79).

Importantly for our purposes here, copper as “wealth” (well-being) or prestige was consumed in many different contexts. It could be displayed as ornamentation or through its use as gifts to the living or offerings to the dead (Hamell 1986:76–77; Rubertone 2001:134). It could also be exchanged. Whether there was equal geo-graphical and/or social availability and accessibility to this form of wealth to and within all native societies is an important question which bears further explora-tion. To what extent European-derived copper metal was actually ever valued in this way or retained these “traditional” symbolic qualities over the course of the contact period is also a critical consideration (see Bradley 2001:32–34).

Native (Indigenous) Copper-Working Technologies Many researchers have now demonstrated that once foreign copper-base metals reached native villages in the northeastern Woodlands, craftspeople often manipulated, reworked, and/or reshaped them, creating objects which may have been either new or familiar in form(s), purpose(s), and/or meaning(s) (Anselmi 2008; Bradley 1987, 2007; Ehrhardt 2005). Many were composite forms (Bradley 2007:54). Not all societies used the same set of techniques to rework the materials, nor did they work them into the same repertoire of artifacts (Anselmi 2004b, 2008). In the earliest phases of contact, most reworked copper and brass appears in the form of ornaments (Anselmi 2004b:417; Bradley 1987; Ehrhardt 2005): beads, tin-kling cones, spirals, tubes, pendants, rings, and bracelets are common. Decorated items exist but are much less frequent (Rubertone 2001:137; Wray, Sempowski, and Saunders 1991:75). As time passed, utilitarian and unaltered forms increased (Anselmi 2004b:417; Bradley 1987). As more and more objects targeted for the trade flooded native markets, and the increasing permanence of European settlement brought access to domestic goods, the greater became the variety of reworked and recycled hybrid objects. In addition to finished objects, industries often contain unfinished artifacts, ex-pedient tools, and rejected materials. Archaeometallurgical testing of these materials generally reveals primary working techniques including cold-working with some hot-working and annealing. Secondary techniques of cutting, bending, grinding, and brazing are also documented (Anselmi 2004b; Ehrhardt 2005; Rubertone 2001). Evidence for melting lead (a technique not known in northeastern Woodlands pre-history) comes from several sites in Huronia and Iroquoia (Anselmi 2004b; Evans 1999 cited in Anselmi 2004b). Casting of lead and pewter (also unknown in prehis-tory) also emerges in areas of Dutch occupation (Bradley 2007:128–129, 170).

WorkingImportedCopperamongtheIllinois

The Illinois in the Seventeenth Century In the mid-seventeenth century, the Illinois were a large, loosely or-ganized group of semisedentary Central Algonquian peoples who are thought to have shared a common origin and language. They are generally believed to

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be precontact latecomers to lands stretching from the southern shores of Lake Michigan through the modern state of Illinois, into what are now known as eastern Missouri and northern Arkansas. The Illinois are thought to have been populous at the time of contact. Organized patrilineally, they lived in semipermanent vil-lages made up of single- or multi-family dwellings arranged in a linked households residential pattern (Brown 1979). Groups followed a subsistence round of horti-culture and hunting, leaving large villages seasonally for smaller winter camps. They frequently carried out raids against Siouan and Iroquoian peoples and other enemies to the west. When European trade goods became available in the western Great Lakes in midcentury, the Illinois allied themselves with Ottawa traders and would later become frequent visitors to European missions/posts to maintain ac-cess to trade goods coming into the region.

The Iliniwek Village The first documented European contact with the Illinois in their own homelands occurred in June 1673, when an expedition traveling down the Mis-sissippi River, led by Louis Jolliet and accompanied by Jesuit father Jacques Mar-quette, visited an Illinois summer village, which Marquette called “Peouarea” (Clark County, Missouri). Marquette describes in detail their stop at the cluster of three villages located a short distance up an unnamed tributary of the Missis-sippi. The villages, one of which was located on the floodplain and the other two stretching along a terrace above the river, were made up of approximately 300 “cabins” and populated by about 8,000 people (Thwaites 1896–1901:59:113–137). Marquette’s journal relates their visit with the “great Captain” of “all the Illinois” (perhaps the peace chief of the Peoria) that included an exchange of gifts (Thwaites 1896–1901:59:119–121) and a “promenade” through the village. Importantly, he provides the first ethnographic treatment of the Illinois based on his early obser-vations of their lifeways. The location of Peouarea, known today as the Iliniwek Village (or the Haas/Hagerman site [23CK116]), is located in the lower Des Moines River valley approxi-mately 8.5 miles upstream from its confluence with the Mississippi (Figure 16-2). The site stretches for approximately 2,100 m north–south and 200 m east–west along the leading edge of a high glacial outwash terrace overlooking the river (Grantham 1993). Archaeological investigations have been carried out at the site since 1992, revealing that, while portions were inhabited during Middle Woodland times, the predominant occupation occurred during the protohistoric/early historic period. The site has yielded important information about mid-seventeenth-century Illinois community layout, domestic life, subsistence economy, technology, and early European influence (Ehrhardt 2004, 2005; Grantham 1993). The village, which consists of a number of structures of various types and several open spaces, was at least partially fortified on the landward side by a wooden stockade. Storage/refuse pit features, distributed both inside and outside of structures, are plentiful at the site and contain primarily village or household refuse. While the range of trade goods recovered at the Iliniwek Village is quite nar-row, the significance of the appearance of glass beads, copper-base metals, lead, and

iron in notable quantities for the time cannot be overemphasized. The inventory consists of metal artifacts and scrap, glass beads, and two iconographic (Jesuit) finger rings (Mason and Ehrhardt 2009). Metal objects, stock, and scrap are made of copper-base metal, iron, formed and melted lead, and silver. Except for a twisted brass gun butt plate, a ramrod pipe (or rampipe), and several lead musket balls, few gun parts were recovered. Iron artifacts include axes and axe fragments; clasp (folding), butcher, and utility knife blades and blade fragments; knife handle rivets; kettle bail fragments; iron coils; one piece of bar stock; and pieces of unidentified objects. Many ferrous artifacts were oxidized beyond recognition.Copper-base metal of European origin occurs at the site in reworked form and as wastage or “scrap” (Figure 16-3). Finished and unfinished artifacts were recovered. Finished articles were primarily ornamental in function, and include beads, coils, bracelets, rings, pendants, tinkling cones, and clips. Artifacts were also recovered in various stages of production. These include cut blanks, pieces of tubing, wire, and scrap pieces of metal sheet. Utilitarian tools are rare; although four copper-base metal projectile points are reported from private collections, none were excavated under controlled conditions (Longoria 1998:136). Two objects of native copper, a small bipointed awl and a worked nodule, were also recovered.

Finding “Style” in Illinois Copper-Base Metalworking In previous work (Ehrhardt 2005), I sought an approach to technologi-cal analysis that was not limited in scope to simply treating the means through which raw material is converted to a finished product, as in chaîne opératoire studies. Rather, because I was dealing with acquisition, reuse, and redesign issues in culture contact contexts, I envisioned technology in a much more inclusive analytical and interpretive way. Above all, it was necessary that a suitable framework (1) consider the entire life history of the object and its “mutability” of use and meaning, and (2) view technology itself as a dynamic system and an overall social process that emphasizes dimensions such as choice, agency, creativity, and (multiple) con-texts and associations. W. David Kingery’s (1993:217–218) technological systems framework proved most successful in this regard because it follows a given tech-nological activity from its inception (material selection) through design, produc-tion, use, potential reuse, reception, to ultimate disposal. For Kingery, the social context(s) in which these activities are embedded remain indispensible aspects of any interpretation. Heather Lechtman (1977) proposes technological “style” as a “package” of technological activities that are culturally patterned systems of ideas and behaviors. I combined Kingery’s technological systems framework with Lechtman’s technological style approach to situate and interpret native material culture appropriation within everyday practice and meaning at the local level (Ehrhardt 2005). That research combined archaeological, documentary, and archaeometallur-gical study of a sample of 800 complete and fragmentary pieces of copper-base metal from undisturbed pit contexts at the Iliniwek Village, producing a nuanced interpretation of what I termed Illinois metal working “style” (Ehrhardt 2005). The Illinois re-formed the European-derived copper and brass sheet metal into

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small simple ornamental forms such as rings, bracelets, beads, clips, coils, spirals, and tinkling cones (Figure 16-3). Primary working techniques (cold, and possibly some hot, hammering and annealing) accompanied by a particular suite of simple secondary techniques, including shearing, perforating, bending into shape with or without use of a mandrel, and grinding, were applied to the metal. Direct evidence as to the manner and contexts in which these ornaments were actually used by the Illinois at this early time is fragmentary. Chroniclers of the late-seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Illinois attest to the incorporation of trade materials (but not to metal ornaments specifically) into special-occasion rega-lia or offerings (Pease and Werner 1934:331–333, 357–366; see Ehrhardt 2005:189 for discussion). However, in the Northeast, native selection of foreign-derived metal and glass beads for use as body and clothing ornamentation is well documented

Figure16-3. Examples of hybrid copper-base metal artifacts from excavated contexts in the Iliniwek Village: (a) clips; (b) bead; (c) ring; (d) spiral orna-ment; (e) perforated pendants (not in the study sample); (f) tinkling cone; (g) and (h) coils made of B-shaped tubing; (i) blanks; (j) segments of B-shaped tubing; (k) and (1) pieces of rejected material or scrap.

from the time of earliest contact (Trigger 1985:126–129). In the midcontinent, evi-dence gathered from mortuary and domestic archaeological contexts as well as from documentary and ethnohistoric sources supports the argument that copper-base metal ornaments were used by native peoples in the decorative treatment of the person, clothing, or accessories in life and as similar embellishments or as grave offerings in death (Brown 1975:37–42; Karklins 1992; Kenyon 1982:24–26; Mason 1986). Ornaments were used alone or in multiples. They were probably frequently combined with other materials such as porcupine quills, feathers, os-seous materials, stone, glass and shell beads, leather (in strips or flat pieces), and textiles and other metals to create an overall composite design with a particular decorative effect. The only archaeological evidence for their use as ornamentation at the Iliniwek Village consists of three leather strip or thong segments with several metal beads closed tightly together along their lengths. In two of these cases, tiny strips of iron were found at the core of the pieces (Ehrhardt 2005:Figure 6.3).

StyleinCraftingHybridMaterialCulture

The hybrid copper-base metal artifact industry produced by the Illinois at the Iliniwek Village overwhelmingly consisted of objects of ornamentation and personal adornment. As such, they may be considered craft goods: that is, “social objects that assume an importance beyond household maintenance and repro-duction” (Costin 1998:3). The social and technological processes that went into producing them can indeed be termed “crafting” (Costin 1998:3). In this section, I wish to delve further into the social aspects of Illinois metal working style by exploring how crafting material culture forms made of imported and presumably rare and valuable materials may have been organized. Was crafting carried out in specially designated areas? Was the material handled by particular individuals as artisans with specialized skills, technological knowledge, or status that held them apart from others? In small-scale societies, production and consumption operate at the level of individuals, households, villages, kin, and descent groups rather than through more highly structured networks in which potentially conflicting valuations for goods and services exist within various (potentially competing) subsets (Watten-maker 1998:12–14). In larger-scale groups, standardized and specialized produc-tion, the increasingly complex scale of production units, and institutional ability to control production and access have traditionally gone hand in hand with political complexity and centralization (Peregrine 1991:2, 4; Sinopoli 2003:2; Wattenmaker 1998:13; see Hruby and Flad 2007 for revisionist critiques of traditional models). Here, however, I wish to investigate how material distribution and produc-tion might have worked in small-scale societies in which social differentiation was minimal and there was little vertical or horizontal complexity (Wattenmaker 1998:12). In such societies, individuals operated in a world of social obligation and distinction created and maintained within a system of kin-based relations. These relations played themselves out continually in contexts of redistribution and generosity through the display of the personal self and through such distributive

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social practices as feasting, bestowing bridewealth, gift giving, and other ritual activities (Spielman 2002). Imported copper-base metals are known to have played significant roles in all of these activities, but how does the actual “production” of these objects relate to those forms of consumption (Sinopoli 2003:15)? Cathy Costin (1991:4) has argued that “differences in productive activities should translate to differential distributions of the materials and artifacts associated with production.” Here, the unit of analysis is the community (see Costin 1991:4). Plotting the distribution of excavated copper-base metal artifacts and production debris over excavated areas of the Iliniwek Village to ascertain patterning in their occurrence should illuminate important aspects of material consumption and the organization of production within and among village units. Where did production take place? Was it specialized in any way? Were objects produced for personal use or for consumption by others? The sample considered in this study consists of the copper-base metal arti-facts found in pit features associated with six different contexts at the site (Table 16-1). These contexts include dwellings, an open walkway, burial sites, a ditch, a shallow oven, and a length of palisade. Pits distributed over these contexts con-tained well over 1,300 pieces of copper-base metal (Table 16-2). Table 16-3 shows that 35 percent (n = 478) of these were finished ornaments, and an additional 10 percent (n = 136) were fragments of finished objects. Thirty percent of the indus-try (n = 413) consisted of partially processed artifacts. Scrap or rejected material (n = 353) accounted for 25 percent. Ten rivets, a nodule, and a native copper awl and bipointed piece round out the industry. Virtually all copper-base metal artifacts were found in and around dwellings; only 1 percent of the industry was found in non-dwelling contexts (see Table 16-2). This indicates that much of the activity surrounding manipulation of these objects took place within the houses with random loss probably accounting for the oc-currence of metal in the other areas. At least two-thirds of the pits in each of the five dwellings considered here2 contain copper-base metal (see Table 16-2; Figures 16-4 and 16-5). All dwellings also yielded more finished objects and fragments of finished objects than partially processed ones. Although the proportion of scrap or rejected material found in each house varies, it never exceeds the amount of finished or partially processed materials. Relative amounts of metal are not consistent across dwellings. Structure 3, rebuilt three times over the course of site occupation, was completely excavated but contains little metal compared to other houses (Figure 16-5). Whether this paucity is related to the presence of three burials within the house is not known. What little metal it does contain, however, conforms to the pattern recognized above.

Level of Production and Specialization at the Iliniwek Village It is clear from the overall widespread, undifferentiated distribution of copper-base metal at the Iliniwek Village that crafters were working with it at the domestic, or household, level. While contemporary documents are silent as to who actually manipulated the material within households, we can suppose that these items were likely “manufactured within a domestic setting by a single

family member or a small group of related individuals who reside together” (as Costin and Hagstrum [1995:620] describe). In the case of the Illinois, these were likely members of nuclear and extended families, who were, at best, intermittent, episodic producers (see Hirth 2009:21).

The Issue of Specialization Were producers specialized? While some researchers have argued that part-time or periodic production at the household level for local consumption precludes discussions of specialization (see Costin 1998:10 and Hirth 2009:14 for critiques), Whitney Davis (1981:228) points out that specialization can indeed be present in “simple” societies. Katherine Spielman (2002:195) argues that “a primary motivation for . . . craft specialization in small-scale societies lies not in subsistence provisioning but in the demand for items critical for social reproduction.” Accord-ing to Spielman (2002:195–196), an important aspect of social reproduction is ritual, which she defines both as ritual practice (including the feasting, paraphernalia, and exchange associated with these events) and as “the use of ritually charged

Table16-1. Iliniwek Village Study Sample Contexts

ContextLocation(site area) Description

Number of pits

excavated

Percent of context excavated

Number of copper-base metal artifacts

Structure 1 C longhouse 77 100 858Structure 2 C longhouse 18 30 264Structure 3 C small ovate 17 100 40Structure 4 C longhouse 1 ? 6Structure 5 B1 round 9 5 37Structure 6 B1 round 14 100 173

Area between structures ½

C walkway/street 6 trench 9

Individual pits

C burials, partial or complete

5 variable 2

Ditch B1 low area outside palisade

1 unknown 0

Shallow earth oven

B1 1 100 1

Palisade B1 stockade, village side

4 7’ length 3

Total 1393

380 K. L. Ehrhardt

symbols as media of expression in domestic life” (as display, or exchange of “social valuables” [2002:202]). Thus, for Spielman, ceremonial performance and emphasis on communicating social identity become important avenues for potential inten-sification in production. She maintains that in small-scale societies, the sustained desires of whole populations rather than of individuals for materials needed to carry out these practices “underwrites” the intensity and scale of craft production (Spielman 2002:196). If foreign-derived copper and brass are to be seen as “socially valuable materi-als” or “social currency” that appeared in ritualized engagements or performances involving personal display, in communication of personal and social identities, and in material exchange, were the individuals who worked with it at the Iliniwek Village specialists? “Specialization” in simple societies clearly operates at differ-ent behavioral and operational scales than models of full-time specialization in

Table16-2. Iliniwek Village Copper-Base Artifact Distributions by Study Sample Context

Context

Number of pits

excavated

Pits containing

Finished artifacts and/

or artifact fragments

Partially processed artifacts

Scrap/rejected material Other Total

Structure 1 77 59 316 270 266 6 858Structure 2 18 12 170 62 29 3 264Structure 3 17 8 18 16 4 2 40Structure 4 1 1 4 1 0 1 6Structure 5 9 6 19 10 8 0 37Structure 6 14 9 82 48 43 0 173

Total 1378

Area between structures 1/2

6 2 1 5 2 1 9

Pits with burials

5 2 2 0 0 0 2

Ditch 1 0 0 0 0 0 0Shallow earth oven

1 1 0 0 1 0 1

Palisade, village side

4 1 2 1 0 0 3

Total 15

complex or state-level production situations might predict (see Flad and Hruby 2007:3). Researchers have realized that intensity of craft production can vary greatly across different types of band-tribal-chiefdom communities (after Cobb 1993:45), especially those in which production is clearly centered in the domestic sphere (see Martelle 2002, 2004). Members of small-scale societies can participate in part-time (or intermittent) production of a specific type of potentially valued, or “wealth,” good while still meeting their own subsistence needs and performing other types of necessary work (Costin and Hagstrum 1995:620; Hirth 2009:18, 20–21). In special-production circumstances, items may be consumed by the affiliate households themselves or destined for intra- or extra-community exchange. Modeling this level of production should, then, initiate new investigations into the appearance of features traditionally thought to accompany specialization in more complex societies (Evans 1978:115). These include workshops, (specialized) toolkits, storage facilities, and systems of regular resource exploitation, exchange and trade, and differential distributions of materials. Archaeological investiga-tions at the Iliniwek Village have not revealed workshops or nucleated production locales. Since there is no evidence that Illinois crafters smelted, alloyed, or melted metals, no evidence of full-blown pyrometallurgy, such as furnaces, forges, or crucibles, would be apparent. However, they did anneal the materials, presumably in or over open fires, to facilitate forming (Ehrhardt 2005). No fire pits or hearths have been found that can be assigned with certainty to annealing activities. The widespread dispersal of multiple artifact types over a number of domestic spaces argues against production in spatially segregated workshops (see Figures 16-4 and 16-5). Rather, artifact processing and production probably took place in less formal settings. Materials may have been annealed in one place and worked further and/or finished in another. Such settings may occur in Structure (longhouse dwelling) 1 (see Figure 16-4), where three spatially segregated pit features contain over 60 artifacts. In one of these pits (F90), several refitting rectangular blanks were found among a fairly large concentration of partially finished artifacts of like type. Identifying specialized tools or toolkits involved in the manipulation of copper-base metal is difficult. The relatively straightforward nature of the technology itself (discussed above) does not necessarily require a repertoire of specialized equipment. Rather, scissors, tin snips, knife blades, mandrels (forms around which metal can be shaped) of expedient materials, grinding stones (implements that could have a variety of uses), and shaping/pressure tools such as antler tines would accomplish the tasks necessary to fabricate objects. Such implements may have been curated for reuse, but none have been identified at the Iliniwek Village. As for storage, no evidence for purposeful curation or stowage of unfinished or finished copper-base metal artifacts or materials has been found. The contexts in which these artifacts occur are generally interpreted to be rubbish pits, dug originally for storage of subsistence goods and reused for household refuse. The occasional concentrations or accumulations of artifacts found in them are inter-preted to be incidents of purposeful discard rather than storage. Here, I take “regular resource exploitation” to mean the regular importation of kettles or copper-base metals from distant sources.3 While there is no way to know for certain what the incoming supply of metal was like during this period,

382 K. L. EhrhardtTable16-3. I

istrib

Table16-3.—

384 K. L. Ehrhardt

Figure16-5. Distribution of copper-base metal in Structure 3 (small rebuilt ovate structure) pit features.

Figure16-4. Distribution of copper-base metal in Structure 1 (longhouse) pit features.

despite known strong Illinois interest in obtaining foreign goods, trade was likely quite irregular at this juncture. Opportunities to accrue foreign goods may have required the organization of trading parties and long-distance travel or involved repeated diplomatic encounters of which gift exchange was a part. The paucity of copper-base metal (less than 1 percent of the total artifact inventory) at the site would indicate that the amount of metal coming in was negligible at best. Once at the site, even small pieces of metal could produce at least one or two beads or clips. In many instances, however, perfectly usable pieces were discarded before being converted to ornaments. Documentary sources reveal that during this period, the Illinois often visited the Jesuit missions on the shores of the western Great Lakes “as merchants” to obtain “hatchets and kettles, guns, and other articles that they need[ed]” (Thwaites 1896–1901:54:167). Some researchers have interpreted this statement to mean that the Illinois acted as “middlemen” in trade to interior groups who had no familiar-ity with European manufactures (Blasingham 1956:195–196). Whether items were processed in some way at the village for export is unknown. Overall, once the metal reached the Iliniwek Village, there was no differential distribution of materials or finished products, nor does there appear to have been limited or restricted access to copper-base metal trade goods.

Elaborated Products and Skilled Crafting as Specialization Researchers have argued that craft specialization in small-scale societies is often associated with increased labor investment, an improvement or elabora-tion in craftsmanship, and/or an increase in sophistication of finished products beyond what might be needed for everyday consumption (Martelle 2002; Peregrine 1991; Spielman 2002:197).4 This occurs primarily in contexts of feasting or wealth display, when obligations must be met or social relations created or maintained. At the Iliniwek Village, there is no indication that in and of themselves, any of the small individual ornamental elements, such as the beads, clips, or tinkling cones that the Illinois created, are elaborated examples of more ordinary objects or reflect a significant increase in production labor allocation (Spielman 2002:200). Rather, each represents the manufacture of a single material element that becomes avail-able to join other prepared components in a larger, more complex and elaborate crafting/production process. The final products into which these small ornaments were incorporated undoubtedly varied significantly in complexity, elaboration, and sophistication according to the specific purpose for which they were manu-factured or the particular identity or aspect of the social persona they were meant to project (see Sofaer 2007:3). The overall task of producing a finished product, such as a garment or an accessory arrayed with artfully and creatively incorpo-rated decorative embellishments of many kinds, required skill and creativity as the situation demanded or the level of impact sought. Labor investment varied accordingly. It is not difficult to imagine that copper-base metal objects may have been differentially combined with items and materials of other media, including shell and glass beads, hide, buffalo hair, fibers, animal parts such as claws, feathers, teeth, and bones, colored stones, clay, and porcupine quills to create aesthetically

386 K. L. Ehrhardt

original, even “enchanting,” finished products like ear bobs, necklaces, jewelry, or adornments for use on accessories such as belts, scarves, leggings, garters, bags, pouches, knife sheaths, or decorated panels (Ehrhardt 2005:186; after Gell 1992 cited in Spielman 2002:200).5 Adorning activity could range from embellishing everyday clothing to outfitting special feasting, diplomacy, or war-related regalia. The skill of the producer(s), then, may have rested in his or her ability to manipulate and manage these material components and design, create, and execute striking and impressive finished products as socially meaningful visual displays of identity or aggrandizement at the personal or group level. Artisan crafters were also likely to have been multicrafters: that is, their skills undoubtedly extended to working other classes of materials (mentioned above) that became part of the articulated whole. One individual may have been responsible for the entire process, or the tasks may have been shared, with several individuals’ work contributing in some manner to the final product. In the end, however, specially manufactured pieces undoubtedly brought prestige to the maker(s) and/or to the user(s), and may have contributed in no small measure to the success or efficacy of the activity in which these products were meant to perform (after Gell 1992:56). Thus, if we can say that skilled crafting existed at all (as I argue here that it did), it may well have manifested in the manufacture of finished garments, accessories, and decorations that creatively incorporated one or several types of copper-base metal ornaments. Embellished attire or ac-cessories may or may not have been used by the individuals who created them, but it is likely that consumption was limited to members of the domestic unit or lineage. The evidence presented above argues for a kin-based form of local, special-ized production that involved the skilled manufacture of specially embellished or elaborated items on a situational or intermittent basis. Absorption takes place within the social parameters of local political and economic structures and social relations such as generosity, reciprocity, and redistribution in contexts of ritual and display. Conversion of absorbed objects and materials into items of indigenous social “currency” or social “value” takes place at the household level by part-time specialists. Production involves management of labor time and a sophisticated understanding of material and techniques, (such as dyeing; carving; and hide, pelt, osseous material preparation) (Peregrine 1991:8). Although none of the criteria presented by Evans (1978) is met here, craft specialization as skill in crafting is indeed likely present, residing in the masterful, aesthetically pleasing (to native eyes) production of composite finished products and the creative production, manipulation, and articulation of their constituent elements. Thus, consumption of copper-base metals in small-scale systems such as that of the Illinois involved fairly even distribution of the material through households, where episodic and small-scale, skilled production processes occurred. Neither acquisition nor production required elite control or management. While some manufacture of these objects may well have been directed toward use in ritual contexts, it is likely that they were also used in everyday contexts as personal ornamentation.

Implications for Social Change Bruce Trigger (1990) has chronicled multiple means through which the seventeenth-century Iroquois struggled to maintain their fundamentally non-hierarchical essence in the early historic period as new forms of “wealth” were introduced and new economic and political pressures were exerted as a result of (material) entanglement with Europeans. Increased competition, factionalism, per-sonal property ownership, new and emergent nexuses of power—all threats to an organizational ethos governed by generosity, reciprocity, and cooperation—were managed and controlled within the system itself. These same kinds of struggles were undoubtedly played out in native societies across the Northeast and the midcontinent, but to what extent they actually affected these systems was histori-cally and culturally contingent (see White 1991). Little is known about the roles the increased availability and assimilation of these materials may have played in spurring potential change in Illinois sociocul-tural systems in the late seventeenth century. Illinois’ desire to accumulate trade goods for their own consumption (and possibly for trade) and to ally themselves with the French and their sources of goods is well known from contemporary documents. This created opportunities for new kinds of alliances and opened new avenues for intergroup interaction and trade (see Bender 1990:251). With these new opportunities came new demands, generated both externally and internally, and the emergence of new social roles within the community. In one of his narra-tives, Father Jacques Marquette (Thwaites 1896–1901:59:167) points to specially designated persons who were esteemed among the Illinois for being involved in trade with Europeans. While this may refer to the peace chief, the impact these emergent roles and duties had on traditional social understandings of leader-ship, personal prestige, communality, and unlimited access to and redistribution of newly acquired materials within the bounds of Illinois society is not known (sensu Helms 1993:189; see also Sassaman 2004:236–238). How involvement in trade with foreigners or their native agents may have promoted asymmetries in the ac-cumulation of differential personal wealth (or personal property ownership) or stimulated new kinds of competition for goods among kin groups or individuals is also unknown. Copper-base metal trade goods and the ornaments made from them quickly became essential players in embedded practices of ritualized material exchange and in personal adornment and display. Whether this led to elaboration of these activities or to an increase in competitive display or redistribution is not known. Another unknown is the effect the trade and modification of metal goods had on household labor and household production. The degree to which the Illinois regarded these materials as “prestige goods” or “prestige symbols” or items of “wealth” is also unknown. If we accept that imported copper (and brass) remained an inherently powerful, symbolically charged material during this period (as native copper had been for many groups of native peoples in the past) and that imported copper and brass, as exotic items procured from faraway places, were imbued with an inalienable power and significance because

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they were once associated with foreigners whose goods and technologies were considered powerful, then copper and brass likely remained valuable both as raw materials and as finished products, at least for a time (Bender 1990:249–250; Helms 1993; Jaenen 1974:275--277; Spielman 2002:199; Thwaites 1896–1901:55:215–217; White 1994). However, at the Iliniwek Village so much useful material is found in refuse pits unprocessed beyond bending and hammering, its symbolic value, even its exchange value, must be called into question. Whether this material had been symbolically or economically debased or commoditized by the time it reached the Iliniwek Village is a provocative question (see Thomas 1991:121 for discussion).

Conclusions

In this work, I have distinguished the use of the terms hybrid and hybrid-ization in material culture production from applications that see it as an outgrowth of long-term settlement and colonial control (see Liebmann 2008:5–6), thereby dem-onstrating that hybrid material culture can and does arise in contexts other than long-term colonial conditions of oppression, identity loss, subalternity, and depen-dence. In contrast, the research presented here experiments with a rather distinctive “colonial” setting for the emergence of hybrid material culture and explores the contexts for its incorporation into native systems. It pushes the center of activity to the extreme geographic fringes of the colonized New World, where few Europeans had even ventured (let alone settled) and where the French colonial program was shaky and uncertain. In these remote environments, disease, dislocation, and increased intertribal tensions had already taken their respective tolls on native populations. In such conditions, I do not doubt that some form of colonialist intent and larger expansionist plan was indeed at play among the French even at the time of their earliest encounters with native peoples of the western Great Lakes. Their political and economic aspirations and maneuverings, even the zeal of their missionaries, are well documented in the historic and ethnohistoric record (see Balesi 1992; Ekberg 1998; Thwaites 1896–1901; White 1991). In this particular temporal, spatial, and geopolitical context, French aims at the local scale appear to have been centered on exploration, commerce, and resource exploitation (Balesi 1992:4; Hinderaker 1997). Their efforts do not appear to have been directed toward domination, incorpora-tion, or extermination of local populations nor were they realistically focused on populating settler communities. French missions/outposts had been established in the western Great Lakes by the late 1660s. Further colonial attempts to establish forts, mission stations, and trading outposts and to claim lands in the Illinois Coun-try continued in the late 1670s and into the 1680s with varying degrees of success (see Figure 16-1). The mission at Cahokia, founded in 1699, is considered the first permanent European settlement in the Illinois Country. Kaskaskia (1703), Fort de Chartres (1719), and Prairie du Rocher (1722) followed. Fort Michilimackinac, which would ultimately become the nexus of trade in the western Great Lakes, was opened in 1715. However, until well into the eighteenth century, the situation was likely as Jordan (2009:35) has described it was for many European outposts: “[T]he radius of effective colonial control . . . likely extended little beyond the garrison’s eyeshot.”

In such a scenario, native agency, creativity, autonomy, and self-interest re-mained largely at the fore (Ehrhardt 2005; Jordan 2009). Power relations between host and visitor were not yet vastly unequal. Native occupants of the western Great Lakes, while quick to form trading and political alliances with the French out of their own self-interest, were hardly positioned to immediately become subaltern peoples. At the same time, however, the structure of native/French social rela-tions was rapidly accelerating from encounter to entanglement as the political and economic interests of all parties became increasingly intertwined (see Jordan 2009; White 1991). It is within this context that the emergence of hybrid material culture has been broadened and reconceptualized. I have provided an example of how one particular foreign material, copper-base metal, is assimilated into an autonomous, small-scale native society and how it is transformed technologically, through skillful crafting, into new, useful, and internally comprehensible social objects whose place in these communities had potential to be immanently transforma-tive at several levels. The “technological style” framework used here to analyze these materials has widespread applicability beyond this work. It is particu-larly useful for investigations that recognize the interconnectedness of material culture and the technologies that generate it with the greater system of social action and expression of which it is an inextricable part. It is a powerful means through which the problem of identifying “[sets] of discrete tribal styles” can be approached (Ehrhardt 2005; Gosden 2004:87). Beyond examination of material culture itself, effective use of such a framework compels careful examination of the nature of micropolitical and microsocial contexts in which interactions be-tween Europeans and native peoples actually took place. As Jordan (2009:32) has recently pointed out, “investigation of the degree of colonial control expressed in particular contexts is a vital aspect of research on the Postcolumbian European expansion.” In conclusion, in the seventeenth-century western Great Lakes, exchange in exotic goods from afar drew givers and receivers into wider and wider networks of complex social relations that affected production, consumption, and distribu-tion systems within and among native groups (Thomas 1991:91, 123–124). These undoubtedly intensified through time, exerting profound pressures on native systems and calling for almost constant renegotiation. Archaeologists are only now beginning to understand what set these processes in motion and the dynam-ics of change within these systems. The usefulness of approaching these kinds of questions from a perspective that views the mixing and/or appropriation of form, material, and meaning in these settings as material culture hybridity has yet to be determined. Further work should reveal whether the term hybrid has greater utility simply as a descriptive term for objects containing elements of diverse origins or develops as a highly workable analytical lens through which material and social change processes can be framed, investigated, and evaluated in broadened set-tings that range from various types of intermittent intercultural conjunctures to full-blown colonial contexts. In any case, hybridity in material culture appears to carry with it themes of cultural exchange, cultural (re)production, creativity, and translation (after Hutnyk 2005:80–81).

390 K. L. Ehrhardt

1. Some researchers have described artifacts, particularly “apostle” spoons, as having been made of “latten.” Latten is generally considered to be an alloy of copper and zinc similar to brass but of uncertain proportions of zinc, potentially also including some tin (see Bayley 2002:16–17). 2. Since so little of Structure 4 has been excavated, it will be eliminated from further discussion. 3. I do not regard native copper as a significant “resource” in this discussion, as Illinois consumers clearly preferred European-derived copper and brass to na-tive copper (see Ehrhardt 2005). 4. Holly Martelle (2002, 2004:30, 32–34) makes an excellent case for craft spe-cialization in her discussion of the exceptional “skill and competence” with which post-contact Huron women manufactured pottery in the early seventeenth century. She cites disease as a significant factor in the “decline in quality and craftsman-ship” seen later (1630s) and coincident with the establishment of Jesuit missions and the onset of large-scale epidemics. 5. Historic and modern literature contains innumerable portraits of native peoples wearing embellished garments and highly ornamented personal adorn-ments as well as images of the garments and accessories themselves (see Dubin 1999; Karklins 1992; and McKenney and Hall 1849–1854 for examples). See Mc-Glaughlin (2003) and Dubin (1999) for examples of the creative persistence of native craftworking today.

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my thanks to Jeb Card for inviting me to participate in this conference and to Stephen Silliman and Kathleen Deagan for their insightful comments on the papers. Discussions with Rita Wright, Holly Martelle, John Kelly, Jim Bradley, Kurt Jordan, Michael Nassaney, Lisa Anselmi, and Matthew Spigelman about the content improved this submission, as did the comments of the reviewers. I gratefully acknowledge their assistance. Larry Grantham helped with the graphics.

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