[The Virginia Indians are] generally covetous of Copper, Beads, and such like trash... They adorne themselves most with copper beads and paintings... In each eare commonly they have 3 great holes, whereat they hang chaines, bracelets, or copper.

John Smith

John Smith

These are copper scrap and off-cuts representing the by-products of trade ornaments produced by the colonists. Thousands of pieces of scrap sheet copper have been found during the James Fort excavations. It is obvious that the English came prepared to trade, not with European copper objects to be recycled or reworked by the Indians, but with sheet copper. The colonists would work this raw material in the fort to produce beads and pendants like the ornaments they observed the Indians wearing.

Indeed, copper may have saved the Jamestown colonists from being driven from their Virginia beachhead during the first struggling years. Copper was so valuable to chief Powhatan that he monopolized it, using the commodity as gifts and payments for service of his lesser chiefs. The Monacan war was keeping Powhatan from his normal source of native copper, which was traded by Indian groups down the Midwest from the Great Lakes area. It was then advantageous for Powhatan to maintain the English pipeline to copper that Jamestown provided.