(Boston Globe)
Yet just as guns did not determine the outcome of conflict in New England, steel was not the decisive factor in Peru. True, anthropologists have long marveled that Andean societies did not make steel. Iron is plentiful in the mountains, yet the Inca used metal for almost nothing useful. But according to Heather Lechtman, an archaeologist at the MIT Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology, Inca metallurgy was as refined as European metallurgy, but it had such different goals that until recently scientists had not even recognized it as a technology.
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