Many nanomechanical testings and surface mechanical treatments—burnishing, shot peening...—are based upon contact phenomena such as indentation, impact and scratch loadings. In this paper, the Mechanically Affected Zone (MAZ) induced by these standard contact loadings applied on a single crystal copper is investigated. We assume that the MAZ can be characterized by the lattice misorientation measured using backscattering electron diffraction. With the help of a Finite-Element analysis, it is shown that crystal plasticity theory can estimate with enough accuracy the lattice misorientation pattern. Experimental results highlight that the MAZ size is always related to the residual imprint dimension and its shape depends strongly on the kind of loading.