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West Mexican Metallurgy: Revisited and Revised

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Journal of World Prehistory Aims and scope

Abstract

Mesoamerican metallurgy furnishes an intellectual challenge in the development of world metallurgies: the evidence indicates that it was introduced from outside after state level societies had been flourishing in many areas. Two questions thus emerge: one concerns its origins, the second concerns what peoples did with this entirely new, unknown material. The evidence thus far indicates that metalworking knowledge and techniques were introduced from northern South America, which focused on lost-wax casting, as well as from the central Andes, where cold work from an initial cast blank was a predominant feature of that technology. Here I summarize what we know to date about the tradition that developed in the west, including some very new on-going research.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Johan García and Sid Carter (CMRAE/MIT for help in preparing the visual material, and Johan García for making his thesis material available to me. I also want to thank Leslie Dewan, for her stellar work on the engineering aspects of Ecuadorian raft design, and Rachel Sharp for her undergraduate thesis work on the Manchon slags.

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  1. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Dorothy Hosler

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Hosler, D. West Mexican Metallurgy: Revisited and Revised. J World Prehist 22, 185–212 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10963-009-9021-7

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