The Bynum Copper Spools

The copper spools found in the Bynum Mounds, three miles east of Houston in Chickasaw County, are evidence of trade reaching toward the Great Lakes about two thousand years ago. National Park Service archeologists John L. Cotter and John M. Corbett dug the site in 1947 and 1948, because the planned centre line of the parkway ran into the base of one mound and across the village. In Mound A they found a small middle-aged woman laid out on a burned floor between massive logs, the principal burial of the mound, with a pair of copper spools on each wrist, the only certain grave goods in the tomb. Two more pairs turned up in Mound B and a single spool in Mound D, some of them filled with lead from galena.

Their 1951 report pointed out that the nearest copper pure enough to be hammered cold came from the surface mines of the Lake Superior region, and the nearest lead from around Joplin, Missouri. Mound B, 80 feet across and 14 feet high, covered a pit where the dead had been cremated under a roofed structure that probably burned. Three cremations lay there with an L-shaped row of 29 polished stone celts and a cluster of nine spear points; the celts were greenstone, which the report traced to the piedmont of Alabama or further north. The site had six mounds. Two were already damaged by a road and by ploughing, and one was left untouched so later archeologists could check the work. The National Register nomination dates the builders to the Miller I phase, about 100 BC to AD 200, and treats Bynum as its type site. The land was bought from Joe Bynum, whom the report called one of the leading Black farmers of Chickasaw County, and the Park Service rebuilt the two largest mounds.