By OBBM Network Editorial Staff

Derived from an episode of The Buried Archive.

What if the history of human civilization is not what we thought it was? The discovery of ancient copper mines in the Lake Superior region has sparked a new wave of research and debate. The Ojibwe people have long passed down stories of a pre-contact, large-scale copper mining operation in the area, operated by people who were not Native American and not European.

The Ojibwe Accounts

In 1888, an Ojibwe elder described a people who came to the shores of Lake Superior, extracted copper, and then disappeared. The account was written down and largely ignored by the academic establishment. However, the Ojibwe oral tradition is sophisticated and specific about distinguishing between different peoples, and the description of the copper miners is distinct from other known cultures.

According to the Ojibwe, the copper miners were a different kind of people, who came from across the Great Water to the east, took the copper in enormous quantities, and eventually stopped coming. The physical anthropology evidence has also entered the conversation, with skeletal remains found in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys that do not match the physical characteristics of contemporary Native American populations.

The Copper Mines

The Lake Superior Copper District is riddled with thousands of excavated pits, in organized patterns that follow the copper veins running through the bedrock. The scale of the operation is simply too large to attribute to any known Native American culture. The techniques used were too advanced, and the mathematics of the extraction don’t lie. As one researcher noted, ‘You cannot argue with 500,000 tonnes of missing copper. It was there. The geological surveys are unambiguous about this.’

The dating of the copper extraction, as radiocarbon and other techniques became available in the 20th century, produced a picture both precise and disquieting. The oldest pits date to around 5000 BCE, and the extraction appears to have continued, with varying intensity, until approximately 1200 BCE. That is roughly 4000 years of organized copper mining.

The Bronze Age Connection

The collapse of the copper mining operation in Lake Superior corresponds roughly to the Bronze Age collapse in the Mediterranean. The Bronze Age civilizations of Europe needed copper, desperately. Bronze, the dominant metal of the ancient world, requires copper and tin in specific ratios. The Mediterranean and European copper deposits were not adequate to supply the demand of an entire civilization in full industrial expansion. Someone supplied that copper, and the source has never been convincingly identified.

The Ojibwe accounts and the Lake Superior copper mines provide a missing piece of the puzzle. The copper that was extracted from the Lake Superior region was of a metallurgical quality essentially unmatched in the ancient Old World. The simultaneous Bronze Age collapse on both sides of the Atlantic is a coincidence that is hard to ignore.

Closing Synthesis

The discovery of the ancient copper mines in the Lake Superior region has sparked a new wave of research and debate. The Ojibwe people’s stories of a pre-contact, large-scale copper mining operation have been largely ignored by the academic establishment, but they provide a unique perspective on human history. The copper mines, the Bronze Age collapse, and the Ojibwe accounts all point to a more complex and interconnected ancient world than we previously thought.

The full episode of The Buried Archive is available on OBBM Network TV.

Watch The Buried Archive on OBBM Network TV: https://www.obbmnetwork.tv/series/the-buried-archive-208380