Copper Culture State Park

A small Wisconsin state park preserving the burial grounds of the Old Copper Complex people, a prehistoric culture that worked native copper into tools and ornaments some five to six thousand years ago. The 42-acre park contains burial mounds along the Oconto River, and the site was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964 in recognition of its significance to the understanding of prehistoric North American metalworking.

The park itself is quiet and unpretentious — a patch of wooded river land with interpretive signs explaining the significance of the site and the culture that created it. Artifacts from the excavations are displayed at the Beyer Historic Home Museum in town. This is not a dramatic landscape, but the archaeological significance is real: the copper tools found here predate most other known metalworking traditions in the Americas by thousands of years. Worth a stop if you have any interest in prehistory.

things to do sight
A story
The Copper Culture people worked copper into tools and ornaments between approximately 4000 and 1500 BC, during what archaeologists call the Old Copper Complex — one of the earliest known instances of metalworking in human history. The Oconto burial site was excavated in the early 1950s and yielded tools, weapons, and ornaments that had been placed with the dead: a copper awl here, a copper spear point there, objects that had taken real skill to produce from raw metal with no smelting technology.