Hi David,
You're right. I think it's a case where I read what you wrote in a different way than you intended it.
Hi Tim,
So far as I know (and I have done some reading), the people of the Andes were casting bronze around 1000 AD. They used arsenic-bronze for some weapons, but metal weapons were not apparently widespread.
As for why the Andeans didn't discover iron even though the area was civilized for CA 5000 years before Columbus, that's one of the bigger puzzles of Andean archeology, and yes, they've been looking. Most of the prerequisite steps were already present by 1000 AD. My guess as a non-expert was that it came from a variety of possible reasons. Here's my list (and remember, I'm not an expert, just someone who's read a bit of the literature):
1. There *might* be some weirdness about smelting iron at high altitude. I've never seen anyone talk about this, but if one of our smiths would comment?
2. Metal tools didn't play an significant role in the Andes until around 1000 AD. They did some fairly amazing things with agriculture, animal husbandry, textiles, and the like (and in fact, we're still rediscovering some of their tricks). However, metal was first (and primarily) used for ornaments, then as an adjunct for stoneworking, and then (finally) for weapons. Odd as it may seem to us, metal was less important to them as a working material.
3. The Andes are wracked by these periodic "mega El Ninos" which last for decades and tend to kill off civilizations (to clarify, many of the people survive, but the centralized city states disappear during or after these drought-and-flood episodes). This seems to have imposed a roughly 500 year cycle on the region, where the survivors of the previous mega-Nino regrouped and formed a new civilization that built new cities under a pleasant climate, only to get wiped out again in the next mega-Nino. Similar disasters hit Europe and Asia, but for whatever reason, the Andes were more prone to them. This seems to have delayed the development of metallurgy, just as it seems to have spurred development of terracing, canals, and other technologies designed to keep people fed during these catastrophes. Seems sensible, actually.
4. This may sound weird to us, but their major weapons were stone, not metal. They used things like slings, which everybody had, which could be made to spec in a few hours out of readily available material (or a day or two for a really fancy one), which had ammunition literally lying around, and which out-ranged the local bows. When you've got that kind of weapons technology available to everyone, do you really need metal weapons?
The metal mace-heads I've seen were apparently status symbols as much as improved weapons.
Those are my guesses. I suspect that, had the Andeans survived uncontacted for another 1000 years, they would have figured out iron metallurgy. Still, there's no evidence they worked iron.
F
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