The life (lives) and times of native copper in Northwest North America

Abstract

Native copper was used by several different indigenous ethno-linguistic groups in Alaska and Yukon starting in the Late Prehistoric period and continuing into the early twentieth century. This paper applies a relational biography approach to an analysis of the possible roles of native copper in northern Athabascan and northern Tlingit society. Native copper was used in a variety of contexts, both as practical and prestige technology, and also possessed animacy and agency, two important and closely intertwined concepts in the ontology of northern hunter-gatherers.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.