Overcoming disciplinary solitude: The archaeology and geology of native copper in Eastern North America

Although native copper has attracted the scholarly attention of both geologists and archaeologists since the middle of the 19th century, it is only recently that native copper studies have benefited from interdisciplinary research. This history of disciplinary solitude can be traced to the professionalization of the two fields in the early 20th century, an era in which crossdisciplinary communication began to wane. The effects of this phenomena resulted in the development of a model of aboriginal native copper procurement by archaeologists that did not take into account the geological literature, which had long identified numerous—rather than a single—source of native copper in North America. In this article, the author discusses how this disciplinary solitude developed and how it resulted in the creation of a dominant model for native copper procurement that constrained our understanding of aboriginal lifeways for generations. The author also considers how increasing collaboration between geologists and archaeologists since the 1970s has led to the reevaluation of an old model of native copper procurement that has been uncritically accepted by most archaeologists for over a century and a half. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.