网帖翻译

Susanna Viljanen
Because they never really went to Bronze Age either.
Metallurgy sets in only after people have managed to overcome the Dunbar number, settle on permanent dwellings, found princedoms and invent trade. The copper and tin containing ores seldom appear together, and they need to be traded from different places. (You need to have the concept of “trade” first instead of just clubbing the the other guys dead and plundering what they have)
The only metals which appear free in the nature are the 1b group - copper, silver and gold - and therefore they are called “noble metals” or “precious metals”. All other metals appear in ores.
The first metals to be employed where gold and silver (hence the concepts of “Golden Age” and “Silver Age by Hesiodos). We call them “paleolithic Stone Age” and “mesolithic Stone Age”. They were followed by Neolithic Stone Age by the emergence of Proto-Polytheism, which enabled the societies to exceed the Dunbar Number, to co-operate with each other, and to form permanent dwellings and practice things which require cooperation of large communities.
Sooner or later someone will discover copper - it needs only to be heated to free it from ores. The Chalcolithic Age is begun - and there were several Native American tribes who knew copper and had transitioned to Chalcolithic Age.
You cannot have nice things if you do not have the pre-requisites first.

因为他们也没有真正进入青铜时代。
冶金是在人们成功克服邓巴数字、定居永久住所、建立王国和发明贸易之后才开始的。含铜和含锡的矿石很少同时出现，它们需要从不同的地方进行交易。(你首先需要有“交易”的概念，而不是只是把其他人打死，然后掠夺他们所拥有的东西)
自然界中仅有的不受限制的金属是铜、银和金，因此它们被称为“贵金属”。其他所有金属都存在于矿石中。首先被利用的金属是金和银(因此古希腊诗人赫西奥德提出了“黄金时代”和“白银时代”的概念)。我们称之为“旧石器时代”和“中石器时代”。 在新石器时代之后，出现了原始多神教，这使得社会能够超越邓巴数——相互合作、形成永久的住所和实践需要大社区合作才能完成的项目。
迟早有人会发现铜——只要把它从矿石中加热提炼出来就行了。铜器时代开始了，有几个美洲土著部落知道铜，并已经过渡到铜器时代。如果你首先没有这些先决条件，你就不可能拥有更好的东西。

To have metallurgy, you need to have permanent dwelling, agriculture and distribution of labour and accumulation of knowledge first.
The only American civilization which knew bronze were the Aztecs, and they had invented bronze only some decades before the Spaniards entered in, and they used bronze only on ritual items. You might say the Aztecs lived still in the Golden Age - literally.
Iron is far more difficult to smelt than copper. Iron is a VIIIb group element, and it has two oxidation values, +2 and +3. Iron can form several kinds of compounds, and iron ores are seldom pure. To produce iron, you have to:
separate the iron-bearing ores from side rock
render the iron-bearing ores into iron oxides
ground the iron oxide particles into as small size as possible
strip the oxides off the oxygen to render metallic iron with a suitable reductive agent
forge any slag off the resulting ore
if you manage to get the iron out of the reaction vessel in liquid form, to decarburize the cast iron
Given on how difficult iron is to extract, the iron was discovered only in the 1200 BC, and did not become widespread but only in the 7th century BC. Much of the Bible is still the Bronze Age, including the historical books up to 2nd Kings and 2nd Chronicles.
Iron is so difficult stuff that iron superseded the bronze finally only in the Dark Ages by the invention of the Catalan forge in Spain. The Chinese invented the proper blast furnace independently in the 2nd century, and were able to produce cast iron. Likewise, the peoples in the Indian subcontinent developed iron metallurgy independently.

要获得冶金学，首先要有固定的住所、农业、劳动分配和知识积累。
唯一知道青铜的美洲文明是阿兹特克人，他们在西班牙人进入美洲前几十年才发明了青铜，而且他们只在仪式物品上使用青铜。你可能会说，阿兹特克人还生活在黄金时代，字面意义上。
铁比铜难熔炼得多。铁有两个氧化值，+2和+3。铁可以形成几种化合物，铁矿石很少是纯的。要生产铁，你必须:
把含铁矿石从岩中分离出来；
把含铁矿石变成氧化铁；
把氧化铁颗粒磨得尽可能小；
用合适的还原剂把氧化物从氧中剥离出来，使金属铁呈现出来；
从产生的矿石中锻造任何矿渣；
如果你能把铁以液态的形式从反应容器中提取出来，就能使铸铁脱碳。
由于铁很难提取，铁在公元前1200年才被发现，直到公元前7世纪才被广泛使用。《圣经》的大部分内容仍然是青铜时代的，包括直到第二代国王和第二代编年史的历史书籍。
铁是一种非常难加工的材料，直到黑暗时代，西班牙加泰罗尼亚的锻造炉才最终取代了青铜。中国人在公元2世纪独立发明了合适的高炉，能够生产铸铁。同样，印度次大陆的人民独立地发展了铁冶金技术。

The Americans had nothing of this. Most of the Native tribes lived still in the early infanticidal childrearing mode, and in Animism - and hadn’t taken the step to Proto-Polytheism which would have them enabled to cooperate and found permanent dwellings and take on agriculture.
The Mesoamerican civilizations lived in an area where they were separated from each other by various mountain ranges and deserts and were not really in interaction with each other. The Aztecs had just invented bronze, but had not yet used it on tools or weapons.
The only iron known to them was meteoritic iron. The Thule Inuits knew the meteoritic iron, and they traded for iron with the Norse in Greenland. But the climate change in the 15th century killed the Norse off - as it did kill off the Dorset Eskimos and almost killed off the Thule Inuits as well.

美洲人没有这些东西。大多数土著部落仍然生活在早期的杀婴育儿模式中，信奉万物有灵论——并没有向原始多神论之外迈出一步，而原始多神论将使他们能够合作，找到永久的住所，并从事农业。
中美洲文明生活在一个被各种山脉和沙漠隔开的地区，彼此之间基本没有互动。阿兹特克人刚刚发明了青铜，但还没有将其用于工具或武器。
他们所知道的唯一的铁就是陨铁。极北之地的因纽特人知道陨铁，他们在格陵兰岛与挪威人交换铁。但是15世纪的气候变化杀死了挪威人——就像它杀死了多塞特爱斯基摩人一样，也几乎杀死了极北之地的因纽特人。
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Allen Jones
Michigan copper was 97% pure, more so than anywhere on Earth where copper had to be smelted and refined around the Mediterranean with tin only slowly replacing natural arsenic for hardening (bronze is very unlikely anywhere but Thailand where surface alluvial tin and surface fairly pure copper are in very close proximity.)
There was vast mining of the copper in Michigan 4,500–3,500 years ago, apparently for Europe’s Bronze Age as Michigan copper’s showed up in an ancient Minoan wreck off of Turkey’s coast and in a very ancient West Indian trading port’s archaeological dig in recent years.
But with no smelting required in North America for the small copper needs, the technologies stopped there. The Inkas did develop Bronze after long use of copper tools and had more advanced chemistry and geology knowledge than the Europeans but weren’t in a coal rich region, the essential step for efficient smelting and refining.
Vast copper deposits in Chile, Argentina (still mostly untapped a millennia later), and Bolivia would have sustained a massive Bronze Age given a few more centuries. Bolivia has both tin (for bronze) and zinc (for brass) along with a great deal of mining before the Spanish.

密歇根铜的纯度为97%，比世界上其他任何地方都要高。在地中海地区，铜必须用锡来冶炼和提炼，而锡只能缓慢地由天然的砷通过硬化来获取。（青铜在全球各个地方都不太可能出现，但在泰国，地表冲积锡和地表纯铜相距很近）（译注：青铜为铜锡合金）
密歇根在4500 - 3500年前就有大量的铜矿开采，显然是为了欧洲的青铜器时代，因为密歇根的铜在土耳其海岸附近的一艘古代米诺斯文明的沉船中出现，最近几年在一个非常古老的西印度贸易港口的考古挖掘中也发现了。
但由于北美不需要熔炼，因为铜需求量很少，相关技术就到此为止了。在长期使用铜工具后，印加人确实发展出了青铜，他们的化学和地质知识也比欧洲人先进，但它们不属于煤炭丰富的地区，而煤炭是高效熔炼和精炼的关键步骤。
智利、阿根廷(一千年后的今天仍未开发)和玻利维亚的铜矿储量巨大，如果再多几个世纪，它们就能维持巨大的青铜时代。在西班牙之前，玻利维亚有锡(用于青铜)和锌(用于黄铜)，并有大量的采矿业务。

The Mayans had a natural stone there with much of iron’s performance as a cutting tool (as well as obsidian which cuts like surgical steel) that made metallurgy a poor return on the time invested.
Iron ore was within all of the Native empire’s reach, especially the Mississippian/Adena/Hopewell with the iron mines of Missouri, Wisconsin, Minnesota that were surface, high quality hematite and magnetite deposits (“The Iron Range”) although a ways from the plentiful surface coal of Southern Illinois which would demand sizable river barges to move to point of use so another missing technology but a simple one. The Iroquois Confederation’s location on the Great Lakes would have made iron well within their reach too (for that matter Ontario is rich in deposits of just about anything one can mine and it’s a heavily forested region for smelting fuels.
There’s a lot of iron ore now known in Brazil (see Vale Mining conglomerate) but beyond the Inka around Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro (important alloy Manganese there too). Southern Venezuela and Colombia have Iron Ore too as does Central Chile which was part of the Inka empire (molybenum too.) Argentina’s minerals and ores have been very poorly mapped (as of 2010) with many of Chile’s deposits such as copper extending over the border. You need either vast hardwood forests with river or ship transportation or surface coal deposits for the heat to melt and shape the metals, that’s a key deficit for all but the civilizations along the Mississippi River and Great Lakes.

玛雅人在当地有一种天然石头，它具有作为类似于铁的切割工具的大部分特性(还有黑曜石，可以像外科手术用的钢铁一样切割)，这使得冶金技术投入的回报率很低。
铁矿在印第安帝国的疆土内均触手可及，尤其是密西西比、阿德纳、霍普威尔、密苏里州、威斯康星、明尼苏达，这些地方的铁矿都是地表优质的赤铁矿和磁铁矿，但这需要大型的河流驳船移动到使用点，所以这是另一项缺失的技术，这还只是冶铁中涉及到的简单的部分。
易洛魁位于五大湖的地理位置，也使得铁位于触手可及之处(安大略的矿藏丰富，人们可以开采任何东西，而且它地处可用于作为冶炼燃料的茂密森林地区。
巴西现在有很多已知的铁矿石(见淡水河谷矿业集团)，但在圣保罗和里约热内卢周围的Inka以外(那里也有重要的锰合金)。委内瑞拉南部和哥伦比亚也有铁矿石，智利中部也是因卡帝国的一部分。……你需要大量的硬木森林，需要河流或轮船运输，或者需要地表的煤来加热融化并塑造金属，这是一个关键的缺陷，不仅是密西西比河和五大湖沿岸的文明。

Sam Morningstar
For the same reason that the Old World didn’t cultivate corn or potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, chocolate, vanilla, etc.
This was before the Columbian Exchange and the Old and New Worlds were effectively cut off from each other. This meant there were no significant cultural, agricultural, and technological exchanges.
Old Wold metallurgy was a collective endeavor, with advances being discovered in North Africa, the Near East, Europe, and Asia. These steps forward, discovered in disparate locations, were then shared within this larger technology sphere. Natives weren’t in that sphere until after 1492.

出于同样的原因，旧世界也没有种植玉米、土豆、番茄、辣椒、巧克力、香草等。
这是在哥伦布大交换之前，新旧世界实际上是彼此隔绝的。这意味着没有重大的文化、农业和技术交流。
旧世界的冶金技术是一项集体努力，在北非、近东、欧洲和亚洲都出现了进步。这些在不同地带出现的进步，在之后的更大的技术领域中共享。土著居民直到1492年之后才进入这个领域。

Felipe de Amorim
Because that’s not how technological advancement actually works.
See, the real world is not a game o “Civilization”. Cultures don’t follow a linear path of technological advancement, that leads to to unblock “Iron Age”, “Industrial Revolution”, “Space Age”, etc.
Quite the contrary, technological advancement happens in bits and fits, with a good amount of setbacks in the way. We have some cultures that are very advanced in certain aspects… ancient indian metallurgy is impressive even to our current industrial standards… and can at the same time seem very poor in others… our society was able to send men outside of the planet, and yet we have failed to eradicate several fatal diseases.
A lot of these happens because technological advancement is determined by social conditions. The ancient greeks, for example, knewn all that was necessary to build steam machines. Why didn’t they, and why the Industrial Revolution didn’t begin in Athens, in the II century b.C.? Because ancient greek society had no need of mass-produced artifacts, and every material demand of their culture was already satisfied by its pre-industrial means of production.
The pre-Columbian native american cultures mastered a lot of technologies. The Nazca culture built aqueducts in Peru that still work to this day, a millenium and a half years later. They had fortified cities, huge monuments, knew astronomy, botany, and medicine. But they didn’t use iron, because they had better access to other materials to use instead of this particular ore. This doesn’t mean they were not advanced; in fact, the nahua actually surpassed the european cultures in areas like architecture and urbanism. They just followed a different path of technological research, that lead them to other discoveries than the ones europeans had. Seeing the european history of technological advancement as a blueprint to every other culture is actually a historical bias, further reinforced by centuries of active attempts to diminish or erase information of natives scientifical conquests, as a way to justify colonization by portraying them as “less developed” cultures.

为什么美洲土著没有进入铁器文明？因为技术进步并不是这样的。
你看，现实世界不是《文明》游戏。文化并不遵循技术进步的线性路径，这也导致“铁器时代”、“工业革命”、“太空时代”等。恰恰相反，技术进步是断断续续的，过程中也会遇到很多挫折。
我们有一些在某些方面非常先进的文化，古印度的冶金技术即使以我们目前的工业标准来看也是令人印象深刻的，但同时在其他方面似乎很差。我们的社会能够把人送到地球之外，但我们没能根除一些致命的疾病。
很多这样的事情发生是因为技术进步是由社会条件决定的。例如，古希腊人知道制造蒸汽机的所有必要条件，为什么他们没有做。为什么工业革命没有在公元前二世纪的雅典开始? 因为古希腊社会不需要大量生产的手工制品，他们的文化的每一种物质需求都已经通过工业化前的生产手段得到了满足。
哥伦布发现美洲大陆之前的土著文化掌握了很多技术。纳斯卡文化在秘鲁建造的水渠仍在1500年后的今天使用。他们有设防的城市，巨大的纪念碑，懂得天文学、植物学和医学。但他们没有使用铁，因为他们有更好的途径来使用其他材料。这并不意味着他们不先进。事实上，纳瓦人在建筑和城市规划等领域超越了欧洲文化。他们只是走了一条不同的技术研究道路，这条道路引领他们找到了欧洲人没有的其他发现。
把欧洲科技进步的历史路径视为其他文化的蓝图，实际上是一种历史偏见，几个世纪以来，人们积极地试图减少或抹去当地的科技信息，把他们描绘成“欠发达”的文化，以此来证明殖民主义的正当性，这进一步强化了这种偏见。

Paul Blase
Read Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond - which explores this question. Basically, before a society can smelt iron, it first must learn to work bronze, which is an alloy of copper and tin. Copper is fairly widely available. However, In Europe and Western Asia there were three sources of tin in the ancient world: Afghanistan, one source somewhere in Eastern Europe, and Britain. Here, the tin was easy enough to find on the surface that copper smelters could experiment with it and discover bronze. There is no such readily available source of tin in the America’s. If you don’t know how to work bronze, you probably won’t discover iron.
There are a couple of other factors which must also be considered. Smelting metals takes large, fixed facilities that are almost always based in large towns or cities. Smelters are not portable. There were no large towns or cities in the Americas until well into the first millennium because there was no way to feed them - the Americas had neither barley, wheat, nor rice, the foundations of Eurasian civilization. The Maya and Aztec civilizations finally took off when they developed a strain of maize that had large enough heads to make a suitable grain crop.

阅读杰瑞德·戴蒙德的《枪炮、细菌和钢铁:人类社会的命运》，这本书探讨了这个问题。基本上，在一个社会能够冶炼铁之前，它必须首先学会铸造青铜，它是铜和锡的合金。铜的供应相当广泛。然而，在古代的欧洲和西亚，有三个锡的来源：阿富汗、东欧某个地方以及英国。在这些地方，锡很容易在地表找到，利用铜冶炼设备，可以做实验并发现青铜。在美洲没有这样现成的锡资源。如果你不知道如何制作青铜，你可能就不会发现铁。
还有一些其他的因素也必须被考虑。冶炼金属需要大型的固定设施，这些设施几乎总是位于大城市。冶炼设备不便于携带。直到第一个千年，美洲才出现了大型城镇或城市，原因在于没有办法养活太多的人口，美洲既没有大麦、小麦，也没有欧亚文明的基础——大米。玛雅和阿兹特克文明在培育出一种玉米品种后才开始腾飞。

Secondly, the Americas had no large draft animals, having neither horses not oxen. A llama can’t carry a very large load and was limited to South America. This means that any kilns or other such operations that could lead to the discovery of iron were very limited in scope.
Recent archeological evidence suggests that iron smelting was first discovered in Africa by large-scale ceramics kiln workers. Even more so than copper or bronze, iron takes very high temperatures to smelt and isn’t likely to be something that any society would discover any other way. So, unless you have a large kiln setup, with a corresponding customer base, and a corresponding clay supply source, and happen to accidentally include iron ore in your kiln construction or firing somehow, no iron except for the occasional meteorite.
The South Americans were about a thousand to fifteen hundred years behind the rest of the world in technology. If they had had the time, who knows what might have happened. But they didn't.

其次，美洲没有大型的役畜，既没有马也没有牛。美洲驼不能负重，只能在南美洲活动。这意味着，任何可能导致发现铁的窑炉或其他此类操作的范围都非常有限。最近的考古证据表明，铁冶炼最早是由大型陶瓷窑工人在非洲发现的。比铜或青铜更重要的是，铁需要很高的温度才能熔炼，任何社会都不可能通过其他方式发现铁。
所以，除非你有一个大型的窑炉，有一个相应的客户基础，和一个相应的铁矿供应源，并且碰巧在你的窑炉建设或烧制中不小心包含铁矿石。
南美人在技术上比世界其他地区落后了1000到1500年。如果他们给他们足够时间，谁知道会发生什么事呢，但是他们没有。

Marijo Readey
The term “iron age” is a very Eurasian-centric term that describes he particular development of metallurgy of specific cultures in that region of the world. It served as an ethnocentric term used to rationalize colonialism by dividing cultures into “us” (post iron-age civilizations) from what were perceived as a less technologically advanced “them.” First Nations were often portrayed as primitive, stone age cultures—and nothing could be farther from the truth. The material cultures may have been different from group to group, but they were not primitive. And any imagined natural progression towards a society with iron-smelting at its core is just that—an imagined sequence that reflects our historical biases.
The First Nations of the Americas had many different physical cultural patterns depending on their environment and needs. Metallurgy was highly developed in some of those nations, but they did not necessarily focus on iron or hardness. Malleability was often the goal rather than inflexibility.
And I’ve got to get in one other editorial comment: non-metal tech has remained a dominant feature of societies around the world. As I write, I am looking at a wooden table, a plastic keyboard, a ceramic mug, a linen canvas and some oil-based paints. My computer is largely built of silicon, plastic, copper and some other metals. There is plaster in my walls, grasses and wicker in my baskets, and now of days, a lot of brick and plaster in my walls. When you think about it, defining epochs of human existence in terms of our use of one element in the periodic table makes little sense, except possibly in light of its military application.

“铁器时代”这个词是一个非常以欧亚大陆为中心的词，它描述了世界上该地区特定文化冶金学的特殊发展。它是一个种族优越感术语，用来将殖民主义合理化，将文化分为“我们”(后铁器时代的文明)和被视为技术不太先进的“他们”。 “第一民族”（First Nations）经常被描绘成原始的、石器时代的文化——这与事实相距甚远。物质文化可能因群体而异，但并非原始。任何想象中的以炼铁为核心的社会的自然进程，都只是一个反映我们历史偏见的明证。
美洲第一民族有许多不同的物质文化模式，这取决于他们的环境和需求。其中一些国家的冶金技术非常发达，但他们并不一定关注铁或硬度。目标往往是延展性而不是灵活性。
我还需要指出说的是：非金属技术一直是世界各地社会的主导特征。当我写这篇评论时，我看着一张木桌、一个塑料键盘、一个陶瓷马克杯、一块亚麻帆布和一些油画颜料。我的电脑主要是由硅、塑料、铜和其他一些金属制成的。我的墙上有灰泥，篮子里有草和柳条。当你思考这个问题的时候，你会发现，用元素周期表中的一种元素来定义人类存在的各个时代是没有意义的，除非它可能被用于军事用途。