Subject: RE: [baidarka] Native tools
From: stlowe@hotmail.com
Date: Thu Oct 07 2004 - 15:51:52 EDT
>> All of the pre-Columbian Americas were essentially stone age.
>They had gold, silver, copper, iron (from meteorites), etc. They new
>how to smelt and to use alloys. Plus trade routes for the same -
>copper from the Lake Superior region has been found all over North
>America. Hardly stone age.
By that standard there may never have been a stone age, since incidental
metal use has been reported in some of the earliest European archaeological
sites.
However, most archaeologists classify ALL pre-eurocolonization North
American cultures as having been either paleolithic, mesolithic, or
neolithic. In order to claim that they weren't stone age, you'd have to
argue that the predominant tool material was metal, or at least that lots of
people had access to and regularly used the stuff. Metal in the North
American archaeological record is so fantastically rare that it's often
explained away as stuff from wrecked ships on the Pacific coast, the product
of accidental smelting in a campfire, etc.
Even the Aztecs, who regularly smelted gold, were (at least at the time I
was in grad school in '87, and by the mesoamericanists that I studied under)
classified as a neolithic culture, because the use of gold was restricted to
ornamentation and available to only a tiny part of the population.
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