Early historic documents, describe American Indians of New England using spoons to eat with (Heath 1986). And using sheet metal to make these spoons was a natural consequence of working with the metal and applying American Indians forms already used in wood carving. The Wampanoag Indian spoon shows stylistic similarities with earlier wooden forms.
Alexander Henry in 1765, said that the American Indians "were used to manufacture this metal into spoons and bracelets for themselves. In the perfect state in which they found it, it requiring nothing but to beat it into shape" (citing Alexander Henry in Beauchamp 1903).
ome decorations on the handles of spoons consist of lines of small circles, which have a small hole drilled within a surrounding engraved ring. A Narragansett Indians sheet metal spoon from Rhode Island has this 'hole within a ring' design. The small circular designs are so consistent with one another that they were probably applied using a specialized drill tip. An identical design also appears on 17th century Seneca shell pendants from New York (Hayes 1989). The tool used to make this design may have been developed by American Indians and could have been constructed by wrapping a strip of sheet metal around a standard drill bit, allowing the drill bit to protrude slightly from its wrapping.
A Western Niantic brass spoon from Connecticut is made from unusually heavy gauge metal. This spoon has a wide ladle-like bowl and a flat wide handle that has been cut into a series of connected diamond shapes. No European maker's mark appears on this Western Niantic spoon and the decoration applied to the spoon handle has the familiar small 'hole within a ring' design drilled into the metal, both of which indicate the spoon was indian-made.
Over a dozen Wampanoag Indian spoons are known from Rhode Island, all of sheet brass and Indian-made from metal traded from Europeans (Beaudry 1980). One of these Wampanoag Indian spoons, which has a wide, thin handle of Indian-hammered brass, has been welded to the back of a European spoon bowl that has the 'makers mark' on it. "Even in the repair or re-fashioning of English spoons, then, the Indians drew upon their own traditional conceptions of what a spoon should look like" (Beaudry 1980).
Narragansett Indians made spoons of sheet brass used a variety of decorative techniques including Narragansett Spoon with raised zigzags and others with dots in the metal handle (Turnbaugh 1984). Another Masachusett spoon, from the Haffenreffer Museum, Brown University, Indian-made of traded sheet-metal is decorated with dots (Snow 1980).
"No doubt, traditional spoon forms, formerly carved out of bone or wood, provided the models for metal spoons produced of brass. Therefore the Indian spoons display stylistic elements, such as pierced handles and forked terminals, which are uncommon or unknown on European examples." [Beaudry 1980]
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