Point made from sheet cut from a brass kettle, which was likely obtained by the Wampanoag through trade with the English
When Europeans brought copper and brass kettles for trade, the Wampanoag and other Indigenous people often re-purposed the metal by cutting it into tools. A brass point, for example, would have functioned the same as the stone points the Wampanoag made for thousands of years. Some metal points had holes in them, which may have been used to attach the point to a shaft or to string them up for transport. William Wood describes the use of metal points on arrows in 1634: “Their bows they make of a handsome shape, strung commonly with the sinews of moose, their arrows are made of young eldern, feathered with feathers of eagles’ wings and tails, headed with brass in the shape of a heart or triangle, fastened in a slender piece of wood six or seven inches long.”
