Is it true that Native American civilizations were entirely stone age? If so, why?

by Psyentific

It's my understanding that the major civilizations native to the New World, including but not limited to the Mayans, Inca, Aztecs and the North American tribes were almost entirely stone age civilizations. That is, agrarian, but pre-metallurgy with the majority of industry using primarily stone and wood. Most notably, I believe the Aztecs made limited use of the wheel and extensive use of obsidian blades, while the construction of the central and south american civilizations was limited to piled stone. Meanwhile, the tribes of modern Canada and the USA used stone arrowheads, stone knives, et cetera.

Is this accurate? If so, why did bronzeworking (and from there, iron and steel) never develop? Did their stoneworking ever advance from stone blocks to concrete-analogues?

brigantus

The Three Age system (Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age) and its variants were created to classify the prehistoric archaeological record of Europe, and to lesser extent the Near East. It's used with modification across much of the Old World but it isn't a universally applicable schema. Notably it's completely useless when it comes to the New World, so asking why Native Americans remained in the Stone Age is akin to asking why Europe never progressed past the Warring States period into the Qin dynasty.

Instead of the Three Age system archaeologists divide American prehistory into five stages. Because metallurgy wasn't as significant in American prehistory as it was in Afro-Eurasian prehistory, the classification is based on a broader set of technological characteristics. You can think of what's known as the Stone Age in the Old World (3 million years ago–4000 BCE) as very roughly corresponding to the Lithic Stage (16,000 BCE–8,000 BCE) and the Archaic Stage (8,000 BCE–1000 BCE) in the New World. Both were stone tool-using foraging societies. They precede the Formative Stage (1000 BCE–500 CE), which is characterised by societies that practised agriculture and had associated technology like pottery.

As for why metallurgy wasn't as significant in New World prehistory as Old World prehistory, there are several good answers in the FAQ. The short answer is that Native American societies did have a tradition of copper metallurgy going back to about the same time as the earliest use of copper in the Old World. However, crucially, the Americas didn't have sources of tin and copper in close proximity like the Old World did, and so couldn't make bronze. Unalloyed copper isn't any better than stone when it comes to toolmaking and so metallurgy was simply never as useful in the Americas is it was in the Old World. And that early lack of utility of metal meant that Native American societies didn't have any reason to develop the technology further, and so never discovered how to smelt iron from iron ore.

Needless to say over the millennia prehistoric American societies made considerable technological advancements, just not along the same path as Afro-Eurasian ones.