[Aztlan] "Mississipian" copper earspools; "Hopewell" and "Mississippian" central american contacts

[E.P. Grondine]

Buenos dias - 

Whenever copper is found, it has been and is often asserted that it must be 
from the Lake Superior area. In point of fact, another major copper deposit was at Copper Hill, Tennessee, and most Hopewell and Mississipian copper appears to have come from that area. Most Hopewell and Mississippian copper is sheet, not nodule. See the finds at Etowah, for example. 

These initial claims are often repeated. 

The only way to know the source is with detailed neutron activation analysis.

As for mesoamerican contacts with the North, see my book "Man and Impact in the Americas" for the Shawnee and Natchez statements on these, and brief discussion of some of the materials known in 2005.

In regards to the Shawnee ancestral contacts, note especially the formative mounds at Baton Rouge, and the sacbe connecting Chillicothe with Newark.
In regards to Natchez contact, the pottery finds from later periods at Poverty Point are the best evidence, though you will have to contact the excavators there for details. That is if their budget has not been wiped out by Katrina.

E.P. Grondine
Man and Impact in the Americas