Tin and/or tin bronze ingots are another product of West Mexican technology transported to other Mesoamerican regions. Artifacts containing tin recovered outside of the West Mexican metalworking zone but which are not West Mexican designs provide very strong evidence that these raw materials also circulated. Ethnohistoric sources provide corroborating data. In Diego de Landa’s sixteenth-century account of native life in the Yucatán, he reports that ingots or blanks (sheets or plates) of a “hard metal” were brought to that region from Tabasco:

Tenían cierto azófar con alguna poca mexcla de oro de que hacían hachuelas de fundición y unos casavelazos con que bailaban. . . . Este azófar y otras planchas o láminas más duras las traían a rescatar lost de Tabasco por las cosas (de Yucatán que eran). [They had a king of white brass with a slight mixture of gold with which they cast axes and large bells that they used in dances. This brass and other plates or sheet that were harder were brought by people from Tabasco to trade for things from Yucatán.] (Landa 1978: 118)

The plates or sheets that Landa observed probably were copper-tin ingots. Brass (azófar) is a synonym for latón, an ally of copper and zinc. Copper-zinc alloys were unknown in prehispanic Mesaomerica, although the term latón appears in Spanish texts describing indigenous metalwork. Latón or azófar were terms apparently used by the Spaniards in a generic sense to mean “copper alloy.” (“White brass” describes a yellowish copper allow.) The statements by Landa indicates that copper alloys were imported from metal-producing zones and used as stock material. Artifact compositions suggest that such allows were of copper and tin. In addition, Berlin (1956: 146) maintains that the materials described by Landa came form the west, citing a statement made by Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1939 vol 1:142) that the caciques, or chiefs, from Tabasco informed Hernán Cortez in 1532 that their gold and jewels were brought to them form the region of the sunset.

Artisans outside of West Mexico thus used metal from copper-tin ingots or tin ingots to fashion bronze objects that were local designs. The ingots were imported from metal-producing regions in the west or possibly from areas in, or adjacent to, the Zacatecas tin province. Imported ingots may also have been used to make certain copper-tin bronze tools, especially in metalworking regions such as Oaxaca, although we cannot know without many more analytical studies. Other artifacts containing tin may have been made from metal produced by melting down tin bronze objects and reusing the metal, as I will argue subsequently. Objects fashioned from recycled metal usually can be distinguished on the basis of atypical concentrations of tin and the presence and level of other elements.