One meteorite from Australia was eliminated due to its distant origin, leaving meteorites from Anoka, Minn. The crosshatching only becomes apparent when a meteorite is cut open and polished. In the 1970s, the beads were identified as chemically and structurally similar to four raw meteorites in the Smithsonian collection, in part because of a distinctive crosshatch feature known as the Widmanstatten pattern. “So in archaeological digs from before Spanish contact, when you find something metallic, you start questioning how it got there.” Widmanstatten “We think of metal today as being everywhere, but it was a fairly scarce commodity before 1492,” McCoy says. The beads in particular drew McCoy’s interest because of his own Native American heritage: He is a member of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, whose ancestral territories covered parts of Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan. Smithsonian geologist Tim McCoy displays two pieces of an iron meteorite found in Minnesota and Wisconsin, which he recently determined were the source of two dozen Native American beads discovered in a 2,000-year-old burial site in Illinois. The Smithsonian now holds two of the beads in its National Meteorite Collection.
In 1945 two dozen tube-shaped metal beads were found in Hopewell burial mounds in Havana, Ill. McCoy is lead author of the study published recently in the Journal of Archaeological Science, which adds to discussion on how the Hopewell may have obtained the metal. Whether the Hopewell were the first to discover the prehistoric meteorite, or acquired it through interactions with other Native Americans is a subject of debate in anthropological circles.
A new study led by geologist Tim McCoy of the Mineral Sciences Department of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, traces a set of iron Hopewell beads to their source meteorite. So how and where did the Hopewell come by enough near-pure iron to produce a handful of exotic beads, small tools and other decorations?
Copper, found in its pure form or laboriously extracted from rock, was common, but they didn’t have the technology to smelt iron. To the Hopewell Culture, ancient Native Americans who sought out the exotic from near and far, metal was a rare and precious resource. The bead on the right (.16 ounces/4.6 grams) is cut parallel to the central hole and exhibits a concentrically deformed structure. The bead on the left (.27 ounces/7.8 grams) is cut perpendicular to the central hole, illustrating the extensive alteration of the bead and infilling of the central hole. This image shows two Hopewell Havana meteoritic metal beads with a (1 cm/.39 inch) cube for scale.
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