Copper Ear Spool

A copper ear spool is a paired ornament worn through a pierced earlobe: two thin disks or shallow cones of hammered copper joined by a central column, so that the piece sits in the lobe like a spool. The standard Ohio Hopewell form is the bicymbal ear spool, with curved outer faces, a raised outer ring and a dished center (Ruhl and Seeman 1998). West (1929) likened them to two short funnels joined at the spouts; many are embossed and a few still hold cord.

Copper sheet was beaten and annealed, then folded, hammered, drilled and rolled with stone and bone tools (NPS). Some spools are thin copper over a core: Hodge (1907) describes copper over a wood base from the Hopewell mounds near Chillicothe, Ohio, and West (1929) a smaller wood or bone core covered with copper or silver at Aztalan, Wisconsin. Some Hopewell spools are faced with meteoric iron or silver, and single-plate spools occur at Trempealeau Lakes, Wisconsin (Kocik 2012).

Some spools still have string wrapped around them (Kocik 2012). Ruhl and Seeman (1998) found that construction plans differ between Ohio earthwork sites and change over time, and linked the change to growing ritual groups. The key trait is a pair of thin copper disks joined through the center by a column, shaped like a spool.

Diameter up to about 50 mm (West 1929, converted from inches); Gibson Mounds, Illinois, 51–57 mm across (n = 6; Kocik 2012, after Perino 2006).

Core area: Ohio Hopewell; Hopewell Mound 25 alone yielded more than 608 ear ornaments, about 500 of them in one altar deposit (Kocik 2012). Also Havana Hopewell sites in Illinois (Gibson Mounds), Hopewell-related sites in Wisconsin, Aztalan, Wisconsin, and some southern states (West 1929; Kocik 2012).

Check for two disks joined through the center by a column. Copper buttons and tubular beads from the same sites lack the through-column (Kocik 2012). Stone ear spools are solid and pulley-shaped; in Oklahoma they date to about A.D. 1100–1400 (Bell 1980). Ruhl and Seeman (1998) use spool design to order Ohio Hopewell sites in time, so a spool's construction carries dating information. Ear spools also appear on human figures in Mississippian art, for example a warrior engraved on a Spiro shell cup (Museum of the Red River).