When the colonists who made up the Virginia Company of London established James Fort on the banks of the James River in 1607, they brought with them sheets of scrap copper. Based in large part on the experience of the earlier Roanoke Colony, the English knew that copper was a highly prized material among Native peoples of the Chesapeake, and they brought it with them as a trade item. Artifacts made from European smelted copper (impure copper and copper alloy) have been found at contact period sites (ca. AD 1607–1680) throughout Virginia, and James Fort has long been hypothesized to be the primary distribution point for that material. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed the elemental composition of a sample of smelted copper artifacts from James Fort (1607–ca. 1625), as well as samples of copper artifacts from five Native sites in central Virginia. We also analyzed a sample of copper artifacts from another well-known European fort site—Fort San Juan (1567–1568) in North Carolina. The results suggest that although a portion of the smelted copper that circulated through Native networks in Virginia came from James Fort, the rest of it possibly came from English, French, or Dutch distribution points to the northeast.

1607 年，当组成伦敦弗吉尼亚公司的殖民者在詹姆斯河畔建立詹姆斯堡时，他们带来了废铜片。在很大程度上基于早期罗阿诺克殖民地的经验，英国人知道铜在切萨皮克原住民中是一种非常珍贵的材料，他们将其作为贸易物品带来。在整个弗吉尼亚州的接触时期遗址（约公元 1607 年至 1680 年）发现了由欧洲熔炼铜（不纯铜和铜合金）制成的文物，长期以来，詹姆斯堡一直被认为是该材料的主要分布点。为了验证这一假设，我们分析了来自詹姆斯堡（1607 年至约 1625 年）的冶炼铜器样本以及来自弗吉尼亚州中部五个原住民遗址的铜器样本的元素成分。我们还分析了来自另一个著名的欧洲堡垒遗址——北卡罗来纳州圣胡安堡（1567-1568）的铜器样本。结果表明，虽然通过弗吉尼亚州原住民网络流通的冶炼铜的一部分来自詹姆斯堡，但其余部分可能来自东北部的英国、法国或荷兰分配点。