THE CRUCffiLE: SOCIOLOGICAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL FACTORS IN THE DELAYED DIFFUSION OF METALLURGY TO MESOAMERICA

In the Americas the invention of complex metal­ lurgy can, on present evidence, be shown to have hap­ pened in two, perhaps, three regions. l Two of these centers of innovation combined to form a single tradition, that of the central Andes, and it was this tradition which spread northward, eventually arriving in Mesoamerica. In the central Andes, metallurgy ftrst appears in the Initial period, an era rough ly contemporary with the Mesoameri­ can Early Formative (Lechtman 1980). Smelting and casting ofmetals and alloys was widespread in the Andes by the tum of the millenium; metal-working having spread first into Ecuador and Colombia and then into lower Central America (Balser 1964; Bruhns 1974; Reichel-Dolmatoff 1975; Bray 1980). From here metal­ lurgical technology diffused north to Mesoamerica, spe­ cifically to the cultures of the Pacific slope and southern Mesoamerica, some 2500 years after the first develop­ ments in this technology had been made in the Andes. There is no evidence of any other origin for the later Mesoamerican metal-working traditions. When metal­ lurgy appears in Mesoamerica, the techniques, the tools and many of the artifact forms were borrowed outright from the cultures of the southeast, specifically from those of Costa Rica and the Isthmus (Bray 1977, 1978. 1980; Bruhns and Hammond 1982).3 Origins then are quite certain, but the vexing question remains: why did the spread of metal-working from lower Central America to the not very distantcultures of the northwest take so long?