From the time of their earliest encounters with European explorers and missionaries, Native peoples of eastern North America acquired metal trinkets and utilitarian items and traded them to other aboriginal communities. As Native consumption of European products increased, their material culture repertoires shifted from ones made up exclusively of items produced from their own craft industries to ones substantially reconstituted by active appropriation, manipulation, and use of foreign goods. These material transformations took place during the same time that escalating historical, political,...