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Where Mesoamerica is concerned, the North American tradition of cold hammering and annealing, and that of south America, consisting of cold hammering, annealing, and casting, inspired the initial development of three distinct Mesoamerican metallurgical traditions. These traditions include those that emerged in the areas of upper Central America or southern Mesoamerica (including southern Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador); the Pacific coastal lowlands including the Tarascan culture area, and the Mexican Gulf Coast lowlands and Yucatan Peninsula which encompassed the ancient Huastec, Totanac, and Maya cultures. Archaeologist Dorothy Hosler (1986) argues that the relatively late adoption of metallurgy in Mesoamerica—after AD 700—serves to explain the largely elite character of the Mesoamerican metallurgical tradition. While both South and North American metalcraft evolved from a utilitarian foundation centered on the manufacture of agricultural implements and other tools, trade and exchange in precious metals ultimately inspired by the Mesoamerican metallurgical tradition. Hence, the wholesale and widespread adoption and exchange of metallic axe monies, tokens, and precious-metal objects.

While recent studies have yet to establish definitively the earliest dates identified with the origins of bronze metallurgy, Heather Lechtman (1986) argues that arsenic bronze was in use in northern Peru by the fourth-century AD. Tin-bronze originated in highland Bolivia by AD 799, and by the Inca era (ca. AD 1450) spread throughout the areas identified with the modern states of Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. Finally, metallic money—in the form of copper axe blades and tokes—appeared in Ecuador by AD 1000 and quickly spread throughout South, Central, and Middle America.

The holistic nature, independent development, and antiquity of native American metals craftsmanship are only now beginning to be clarified. Metallurgical technologies that were developed by pre-Columbian craftsmen are far too numerous to discuss in any detail in this essay. However, a partial listing should provide some idea of the significance of this legacy. Those identified to date include, (a) the cire perdue or lost wax casting process, (b) surface metallurgy, depletion gilding, acid pickling, and tumbaga, (c) the application of organic reagents and binding emulsions, (d) arsenic, copper-arsenic, and tin-bronze casting, (3) copper-arsenic, tin, and bismuth alloys, (f) silver chloride coatings, (g) gilt copper sheeting, gold and silver sheating, sheet metal processing and fabrication, mechanical crimping, gold-leaf treatments, hammer-welding, and the raising of sheet metal vessels, (h) silver/silver-copper/spot solder and soldering, (i) copper soldering, brazing, and spot welding, (j) electrochemical replacement plating, (k) coplex annealing, cold-hammer and anvil, binary and ternary alloy processing, and ground and hammered meteoric iron implements, (l) charcoal-fed ore reduction and air-blast smelting/refining furnaces, (m) iron ore or hematite flux, and the reduction of sulfide ores, (n) open cast, multi-component, and vented casting molds, and powdered carbon casting emulsions such as that of the Aztec teculatl (charcoal water), (o) mechanical and metallurgical joins including metal nails, rivets, staples, ribbon clips, strip clips, lacing, long sockets, short tabs, tab-and-slot and other metal fasteners, (p) repoussé and other embossed sheet metal applications, including cinnabar cloisonné, (q) solid-state diffusion bonding, sweat welding, fusion gilding or Sheffield plating, and cladding, (r) rush casting, (s) multi-component sheet metal miniatures, (t) color surface and power metallurgy, (u( technologies for the manufacture of thin cast rods, wire coils, strip wire, wire-work surfacing and filigree, metal sequins, quad metal mosaics, architectural cramps, agricultural blades and implements, socked chisels and related tools; and copper and bronze axe blades, metallic monies and tokens, (v) arsenic and tin=bronze implements including fish hooks, eyed needles, pins, depilatory tweezers, and surgical instruments such as tumi knives and blades, (w) the standardization of metal ingots and tools, (x) platinum processing and the sintering of refractory metals such as platinum, and finally, y) a variety of prospecting methods, including shallow shaft mining, the strip mining of exposed deposits, and the placer mining of alluvial gold and platinum. According to Heather Lechtman, the tumbaga allows alone “constitute the most significant contribution of the New World to the repertoire of alloy systems developed among ancient societies”. It should be noted that the processing of platinum (which has a melting temperature of 3000 degrees Fahrenheit), was a feat accomplished by ancient Ecuadorian metallurgists by way of the “mixing of grains of platinum with gold dust” through a powder process identified with the “sintering of refractory metals” (Easby, Jr, 1966).

Electrochemical replacement plating and depletion gilding, developed by the Moche of Peru nearly two thousand years ago, allowed ancient Native Americans to plate precious metals on to semi-precious metals to a thickness of less than one micron. The electrochemical replacement process was not rediscovered until the twentieth century AD. Recent studies indicate that electrochemical replacement plating and depletion gilding or silvering “both involve sophisticated chemistry, and Precolumbian surface metallurgy is surely as much chemistry as it is metallurgy” (Lechtman, 1986). As Easby says, “the tale persists that the egotistical Benavento Celini spent months trying to ascertain how an ancient Mexican craftsman had fashioned a silver fish with gold scales and finally conceded that he was baffled”. Unfortunately, as is the case with so many other aboriginal New World technological innovations, the very presence of such metallurgical traditions as that of the lost-wax casting process and tine and arsenic-copper bronze alloys was once taken to indicate that such technologies were introduced or diffused from the Old World.

Recent archaeological investigations underscore the paucity of information pertaining to metallurgy currently at our disposal, and the abundance of ancient archaeological materials that have yet to be studied in any systematic fashion. Unfortunately, the relatively recent and highly specialized nature of publications pertaining to pre-Columbian metallurgy have led some scholars to suppose that even the most ingenious ancient Native American technologies were little more than isolated or accidental instances of technical insight and ingenuity. Such scholarly perspectives are clearly artifacts borne of the relative scarcity of and limited access to information. As the body of studies grows, it is becoming clear that innovations in metallurgy, such as depletion gilding and electrochemical replacement plating.

While the wholesale destruction in the pre-Columbian world has closed an important window on the cosmology and beliefs of its metallurgists, we can nevertheless advance interpretations as to the social and ritual significance of metals based on contact-period and ethnographic accounts.

Both Inca and Aztec craftsmen, and Native Americans more generally, identified precious metals—gold and silver—with the male and female principles. The alloying of copper and gold, or copper, gold, and silver, which produced a red, pink, or golden metal known as tumbaga, was in turn identified with the menstrual flow and ambered moon. Among the contemporary metals craftsmen of west Africa, smelters are designed to symbolize the female sexual organs, while the metals themselves are thought symbolic of the male principle embodied in semen and other bodily fluids. The cosmological message inherent in the metal itself, while combined with the supernatural and religious icons and images, must surely have served to enhance the power and prestige of the bearer, while at the same time providing clear indications of that individual’s identification with supernatural and cosmic forces. The use of metals in personal adornment and ritual attire served to convey the associations of the bearer with universal principles, within which gender ultimately served as a distinguishing characteristic of the individual and cosmos.