Never forget what’s possible

I have been thinking about group behavior again. There is a reason people are afraid of conspiracies, or more accurately, afraid of going against the grain. They fear being ostracized from the group. It is not abstract philosophy. It is survival. In academic, professional, and corporate fields, the pattern is the same. When a narrative hardens, stepping outside it carries real costs. Jobs disappear. Funding dries up. Colleagues suddenly see a friend across the room and need to talk to them. The conversation ends. I have watched it happen more times than I can count, and not only in archaeology.

This is why the copper of Lake Superior remains such a charged subject. It should not be. The evidence is physical, measurable, and increasingly hard to dismiss. Yet the moment the discussion turns toward possible contact between the Near East and North America in the Bronze Age or earlier, the temperature changes. People get skittish. They change the subject. I do not believe the copper trade from Lake Superior is a conspiracy theory. I believe it is an under-examined historical reality, and the resistance to it reveals more about institutional incentives than about the data.

Roger L. Jewell’s Ancient Mines of Kitchi-Gummi: Cypriot / Minoan Traders in North America remains one of the more level-headed treatments of the subject. Jewell does not rant. He lays out the scale of prehistoric mining on Isle Royale and the Keweenaw Peninsula, the volume of pure native copper removed, and the awkward fact that so much of it seems to have vanished from North America’s archaeological record. Estimates vary, but the lower end runs to tens of millions of pounds extracted over centuries beginning roughly 3000 BCE or earlier. The upper estimates are higher still. Native copper of that purity, occurring in large masses that could be worked cold, is geologically unusual. Lake Superior is the standout source. 

I have been up there myself. The Upper Peninsula leaves an impression. The landscape, the isolation, the sheer number of ancient pits still visible in places, all of it sits in the mind differently once you have walked the ground. Mainstream accounts, such as Susan R. Martin’s Wonderful Power, document the Native mining and the extensive trade of copper artifacts across the Midwest and beyond. That part is not in dispute. The Hopewell and Adena cultures moved copper hundreds of miles. They moved Yellowstone obsidian even farther. Orthodoxy accepts long-distance foot and canoe trade within the continent. It balks at the idea that the same copper, or knowledge of the same source, could have reached the Mediterranean by sea. 

I attended a lecture by John E. Hancock when his Smithsonian Books volume on the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks came out. The book is careful, well-illustrated, and frames the sites within the indigenous narrative that has become the required language for World Heritage and institutional publication. Hancock has done serious work on the geometry and lunar alignments of the Ohio earthworks. The conversation before and after the talk was civil. Then the subject of copper trade came up, and the tone shifted. Once it became clear I was not content to stop at the indigenous-only explanation, the interest cooled. That is the pattern. UNESCO recognition is valuable. The political framing that accompanies it is not optional if you want the institutional platform. I understand the pressure. I do not accept that it settles the historical question. 

The Blue Pill Pays Well, but the Truth is in the Red Pill, Not a Popular Decision:

The same dynamic appears across fields. During COVID, expert consensus hardened rapidly around certain data interpretations from the CDC and related bodies. Dissent carried professional risk. Careers were damaged. People who had built comfortable lives inside the consensus had every incentive to stay inside it. The sociological pattern is not unique to public health. It operates in archaeology, history, and the soft sciences whenever a preferred narrative about origins, land, or cultural purity is at stake. A professor at Marquette or any similar institution who begins teaching that Mediterranean traders may have been active on Lake Superior risks the quiet professional death that follows from being labeled unreliable or politically tone-deaf. No one has to fire you formally. The invitations stop. The grants dry up. The department stops protecting you. Group behavior does the rest.

I do not romanticize the red-pill posture. It is often lonely, and it does not pay well. But the alternative is to pretend that evidence stops mattering once it threatens the story. Behind my interest in the copper is a long-standing rebellion against that academic etiquette. Truth is not a popularity contest.

Here are the primary reasons I find the case for significant transatlantic movement of Lake Superior copper, and associated cultural contact, between roughly 3000 BCE and 10000 BCE persuasive. The list is not exhaustive, and not every item is equally strong. Taken together, they form a pattern that orthodoxy has not adequately answered.

First, the sheer volume and purity of the copper. Prehistoric miners removed enormous quantities of nearly pure native copper from the Lake Superior region. Much of it is not accounted for in the surviving North American archaeological inventory. Bronze Age Mediterranean societies consumed copper at industrial scale. A source of cold-workable, high-purity copper would have been economically transformative. The Uluburun shipwreck, dated to around 1320 BCE, off the coast of Turkey, carried approximately 10 tons of copper ingots, along with tin and other luxury goods. The vessel was a substantial, sophisticated craft. If such ships were operating in the eastern Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age, then the technological capacity for longer voyages in the northern Atlantic existed earlier. 

Second, long-distance trade is already conceded inside North America. Hopewell people obtained copper from the Superior region and obsidian from the Yellowstone area. Distances of 900 miles or more, traveled on foot or by water, are accepted without controversy. Once that capacity is granted, the additional claim that no one ever continued the northern route via Hudson Bay, Greenland, Iceland, and the British Isles becomes an assumption rather than a demonstrated barrier. Sea levels were lower for long stretches of the relevant period. Coastal and island-hopping routes would have been more forgiving than they are today.

The Lesson of Captain Bligh:

Third, human capability for open-boat ocean travel is not theoretical. After the mutiny on the Bounty, Captain William Bligh and a small loyal crew covered roughly 3,618 nautical miles in a 23-foot open launch, navigating by memory, dead reckoning, and the stars, reaching Timor in about 45 to 47 days. They avoided hostile landings and stretched meager provisions across the Pacific. If a determined 18th-century British officer could do that without charts under survival conditions, then Bronze Age or earlier sailors, with purpose, better vessels, and knowledge of prevailing winds and currents, could have managed the northern Atlantic circuit. The Phoenicians and earlier Mediterranean seafarers were not less capable. 

Fourth, certain artifacts refuse to fit neatly. The Newberry Tablet, recovered in 1896 in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula after a storm toppled a tree and exposed objects entangled in the roots, carried inscriptions in 140 squares. Photographs survive; the original deteriorated after poor storage. Some researchers have argued the signs resemble Cypro-Minoan or related scripts. The discovery predates modern knowledge of Linear A and related systems. A tree of that size does not grow overnight over a planted modern fraud. The Michigan Relics as a broader category include clear forgeries, but the Newberry find has peculiarities that keep it from being dismissed with a wave of the hand. Similar problems attach to other contested pieces such as the Wilmington Tablet from the Adena context in Ohio. Orthodoxy prefers to label them all frauds aimed at dispossessing indigenous claims. That explanation is politically convenient. It is not always archaeologically decisive. 

Cocaine in Egyptian Mummies:

Fifth, the botanical evidence from Egyptian mummies. In 1992, toxicologist Svetlana Balabanova and colleagues reported traces of nicotine and cocaine in tissues and hair of Egyptian mummies spanning a wide date range. Cocaine is derived from a New World plant. Nicotine is more complicated because other Old World plants contain it, yet the concentrations and the presence of cocaine raised the contact question immediately. Subsequent work has been contested, with contamination from modern handling or insecticides offered as explanations. Forensic-style testing, as used in criminal courts, produced the original results. The debate continues, but the data did not vanish simply because it was inconvenient. 

Sixth, architectural and astronomical parallels. The lunar standstill alignments at Stonehenge have counterparts in the Hopewell earthworks of Ohio, particularly the Newark complex. Dolmens and related megalithic forms appear in the Jordan Valley, the British Isles, New England, and the Upper Great Lakes region. Mainstream geology attributes many of the American examples to glacial deposition. The formal similarities and the association of some of these landscapes with skull cults, beer brewing, and ritual architecture at sites like Göbekli Tepe (and related early Holocene complexes) invite comparison rather than automatic dismissal. A submerged stone alignment in Grand Traverse Bay, located in 2007 at a depth of roughly 40 feet by Mark Holley, dates to a period when lake levels were lower, and the area was dry land. Media called it a “Stonehenge.” Holley himself has been more cautious, describing a long linear arrangement rather than a classic henge. The date range, however, places human activity on that landscape thousands of years before the classical Hopewell. 

Seventh, cultural and religious correspondences. Skull veneration, psychedelic or beer-based ritual, and communication with non-ordinary intelligences appear in early Near Eastern contexts, in Greek mystery practices that laced wine, and in ethnographic accounts of North American shamanism. The same pattern of entities contacted through altered states recurs. I do not treat this as proof of direct migration of priests. I treat it as evidence that the same spiritual technology and the same class of non-human intelligences were being engaged on both sides of the ocean. The Canaanite and broader Levantine world that produced the biblical accounts of Rephaim and related giant clans occupied the same landscape of dolmens and high places. Early newspaper reports of large skeletal remains in Ohio mounds were later suppressed or explained away, partly because they complicated the emerging political narrative that all significant pre-Columbian culture was indigenous and that European presence began with Columbus. The political utility of that narrative does not make it complete history.

Eighth, the northern route is geographically coherent. From the copper districts one can move by water and portage toward Hudson Bay, then by sea past Greenland and Iceland to the British Isles and down the Atlantic coast into the Mediterranean. The Odyssey, though a literary work, preserves descriptions of long days that fit higher latitudes better than the confined Mediterranean. Most classical literature of the period did not survive. What remains is a thin sample. Treating Homer’s poem as pure fantasy while ignoring the possibility that it encodes remembered routes is a choice, not a necessity. Troy was real. The ships of the period were real. The copper cargoes were real.

It’s All About the Bog People

Ninth, recent discoveries continue to complicate the closed story. Windover in Florida yielded remarkably well-preserved brains and evidence of a caring, structured society thousands of years ago, whose genetic profile does not map neatly onto later-known tribes. Poverty Point, the Adena and Hopewell sequences, and Cahokia (whose Monk’s Mound remains one of the largest earthen pyramids in the Americas) show complex, interconnected societies that moved materials and ideas across vast distances. Each new site that surfaces, whether under construction or by sonar, forces another quiet revision. The institutional response is usually to absorb the data into the existing indigenous-only model and move on. The model is stretched thinner with every decade.

I could continue. The point is not that every anomalous tablet is genuine or that every newspaper giant story from the 19th century is accurate. The point is that the cumulative weight of mining scale, missing metal, admitted intra-continental trade, demonstrated seafaring capacity, contested but persistent artifacts, botanical anomalies, architectural parallels, and ritual correspondences is more than noise. It is a signal. Orthodoxy’s refusal to engage it seriously is itself evidence of the group behavior problem I began with.

Jewell’s Book is a Good Start

I finished Jewell’s book and found it useful precisely because it stays relatively measured. I go further than he does in terms of chronological depth and the frequency of contact. Lower sea levels, better boats than we sometimes assume, and powerful economic and spiritual incentives make repeated voyages plausible across millennia. The same human ingenuity that built the pyramids and the Sphinx, that organized the copper trade of the eastern Mediterranean, and that produced the precise lunar geometry of the Ohio earthworks is not suddenly incompetent when the Atlantic intervenes.

The blue-pill life is comfortable. It comes with pensions, conference invitations, and the warm feeling of belonging. The red-pill alternative does not. I have watched capable people choose the paycheck. I understand the choice. I do not respect it when it requires pretending that inconvenient evidence does not exist. Whether the subject is COVID data, election integrity, or the copper of Lake Superior, the pattern is the same. Group survival is prioritized over truth-seeking. That is why the conversation keeps getting shut down. That is also why it will not stay shut down. Physical evidence has a longer half-life than institutional consensus.

The copper mines of Lake Superior are one of the largest archaeological stories still sitting in plain sight. They should be mainstream. Serious, multi-disciplinary work that follows the metal, the isotopes, the boat technology, and the ritual parallels wherever they lead is overdue. I will continue to say so. Popularity is not the measure. Evidence is.

I base my opinions about Lake Superior Copper Trade again on these factors:  

• My trip to the Upper Peninsula
• The Newberry tablet.
• The Dolmans of the Near East. 
• The admission that copper was traded by the Hopewell culture, 900 miles away.  
• That Captain Bligh traveled from Tonga to Timor — Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia)  3,600 nautical miles over 36 days with only 1 week of food and water.  It was a death sentence.  
• Cocaine and tobacco in Egypt, 1992: the material is in the hair shafts, not contamination. 
• The Uluburun shipwreck (1300 BCE) shows Egypt, Canaan, Cyprus, and the Aegean were part of a massive trade network. George Bass.
• Stonehenge off Traverse City, 9000 years ago.  Validates Newberry. It was first discovered in 2007 by sonar.
• Of course, Windover. 
• Communication might have occurred through shamans rather than through evolutionary contact.  
• LiDAR in South America
• Cahokia
• The Odyssey path. 
• Poverty Point and Olmecs, my Wilmington Tablet

Notes

1.  Roger L. Jewell, Ancient Mines of Kitchi-Gummi: Cypriot / Minoan Traders in North America (Jewell Histories, various editions). Summarizes the scale of prehistoric extraction and the Mediterranean trader hypothesis.

2.  Susan R. Martin, Wonderful Power: The Story of Ancient Copper Working in the Lake Superior Basin (Wayne State University Press, 1999). Mainstream archaeological synthesis of Native mining and trade.

3.  On the Uluburun wreck and its copper cargo, see the Institute of Nautical Archaeology summaries and Cemal Pulak’s publications; roughly ten tons of copper ingots, late 14th century BCE.

4.  Captain Bligh’s open-boat voyage: standard historical accounts place the distance at approximately 3,618 nautical miles in 45–47 days.

5.  Newberry Tablet: contemporary newspaper reports from 1896; later discussions in epigraphic and alternative archaeology literature; original largely destroyed by poor storage.

6.  Balabanova et al., early 1990s toxicological studies on Egyptian mummies; subsequent controversy over contamination versus genuine presence of New World alkaloids.

7.  Grand Traverse Bay stone alignment: Mark Holley, 2007 discovery; media “Stonehenge” framing versus Holley’s more restrained description of a linear feature on a former shoreline.

8.  John E. Hancock, Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks: Landscape Monuments of the Ancient Ohio Valley (Smithsonian Books). Documents the UNESCO sites and indigenous framing.

9.  On Hopewell long-distance trade networks, standard archaeological literature accepts Superior copper and Rocky Mountain obsidian among other materials.

Selected Bibliography

Bass, George F., et al. Publications on the Uluburun shipwreck (Institute of Nautical Archaeology).

Hancock, John E. Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks: Landscape Monuments of the Ancient Ohio Valley. Smithsonian Books.

Jewell, Roger L. Ancient Mines of Kitchi-Gummi: Cypriot / Minoan Traders in North America. Jewell Histories.

Martin, Susan R. Wonderful Power: The Story of Ancient Copper Working in the Lake Superior Basin. Wayne State University Press, 1999.

Pulak, Cemal. Various papers on the Uluburun cargo and Late Bronze Age maritime trade.

Additional primary reports on the Newberry find (1896 local Michigan newspapers), Balabanova toxicology papers (1992 onward), and Holley’s Grand Traverse Bay survey notes. Classical sources include Homer’s Odyssey (any standard translation) for the literary reflection of long-distance seafaring memory.

Rich Hoffman

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com.  If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.