The ancient Bolivian temple of Tiwanaku is one of the wonders of the world-it has stonework far more advanced than anything built by the Incas or Aztecs:Tiwanaku - Wikipedia
The amazing stone cutting work had to have been done with metal (bronze) tools-stone hammers (such as used by the Incas) would never have sufficed for such fine work. The other amazing thing-the foundation stones were clamped together using arsenic bronze clamps. This was a technique used by the Greeks (except that they used iron clamps).
My question: why would these people have abandoned metal tools? From the time of the Incas on (in the Americas), nobody used metals at all (except for gold ornamental work). The people who built Tiwanaku used many techniques that were far in advance of anything at that time-so why did they regress and abandon their magnificent works?
No tin?
That’s what I was going to say. Maybe they had trouble accessing the raw ingredients.
If the people with the knowledge died; through disease/plague, warfare, starvation or stupidity (leadership or arsenic poisoning), that would be the end of it.
It could also be, as Bosda implies, that the easily gathered and worked available resources were used up.
Loss of knowledge was fairly common in the ancient world.
No decent albums after And Justice For All, probably.
In all likelihood, a civilization without metal wiped out the civilization that did, and didn’t bother to save the metallurgists. The thing about pre-literate cultures is that knowledge always dies with the people who hold it in their heads.
You need a certain ability to produce specialists to do metal-working, people who can devote time to mining, refining, and crafting rather than food production. If sufficient bad famine years hit it can wipe out such luxuries as metal working in small village based cultures.
And they may have used up all the easily accessible ore.
Or war - although you’d think conquerors would recognize the value of metal and keep the specialist alive, but maybe not if metal-working wasn’t well known, or if it was a village vs. village conflict rather than a conquering horde of some sort.
Besides the little cramps they used to hold some stones together, I don’t see any reference in the wiki site that they had a true understanding and use of metalurgy. Maybe they were almost but not quite at a true metal working stage.
Also, my BS detectors start pinging whenever anyone says “those people couldn’t have done what they did with the primitive technology available to them.” Because it almost always turns out that they really really did.
This isn’t true, the Inca’s used copper, tin and silver and made bronze. And while most of the stuff was decorative, they made metal weapons and tools as well.
From wikipedia on Incan Society
So I’d say the answer to the OP’s question is: “they didn’t”.
Unlikely-Bolivia is one of the world’s largest producers of tin.
But how available was it to the people of the time with only their technology, instead of modern mining techniques?
Again, the OP is based on a false premise. The successors to the people of Tiwanaku continued to use copper, tin and bronze for tools and weapons. There is no mystery to solve.
Your reference lacks citations.
? What does this have to do with pre-columbian metallurgy?
How did they finish such large building stones with flat surfaces? If you look at Inca built wall, the blocks are very roughly finished (they fitted them by grinding them against eachother). At Tiwanaku, the blocks are perfectly squared off-they even drilled precise holes into certain blocks.
This could not have been done without metal tools.
It is hard to imagine people going back to stone tools, after having metal tools.
As for the arsenic bronze, it is quite a bit harder than standard (copper-tin) bronze,and the hardness would have been helpful in finishing stonework.
Are you a stonemason? You are making an assertion without proof, and it may be based upon ignorance. You’d be amazed at what some people can do without power tools, cranes or bulldozers.
Any softer stone can be chipped and finished by harder material. It takes a lot more time than using metal tools, but it can be done rather easily. It is a skill, like anything else.
while I have no axe to grind in this:D; I might propose another thought.
Consider that it wasn’t the lack of metal producing ores, but perhaps the lack of large amounts of fuel required to process the ore. I can see where a society finally uses up most of their wood and can no longer maintain the intense fires required to smelt large amounts of metal.
Exhaustion of fuel seems a common theme in societies.
The OP is amazed by their stone work, but what really struck me in the wiki article was their agricultural production. They produced more potatoes per acre than modern farms.