Pperiod re-Hispanic metallurgy of the Americas is known for its technical variety. Over a period of more than three thousand years, different techniques were adopted by various Indian communities and adapted to their own cultures and beliefs. In the Central Andes, gold and silver were the predominant metals, while copper was used as a base material. Central Andeans developed an assortment of copper-based alloys. Smiths hammered copper into sheets that would later be used to create objects covered with thin coatings of gold and silver. In northern South America and the Central American isthmus gold-copper alloys were particularly common.'Copper metallurgy was also important in Western Mexico and farther north.

Putting various local technological preferences aside, Amerindians used copper extensively as a base material. What then were the underlying concepts that governed the symbolism of copper, its combination with other metals, and particular technologies such as casting methods in Pre-Columbian Colombia, Panama, and Costa Rica? Studies of physical and chemical processes are essential to a scientific approach to metallurgy, but for a fuller understanding, technologies should not be divorced from cultural contexts. Establishing a line between technology and culture or between technology and symbolism would be to ignore the fundamental unity of technology and ideology for, as Heather Lechtman (1975) points out, technologies are systems of beliefs in themselves. This is why the symbolism of Amerindian metallurgy should not be isolated from the thought processes, experiences, and theories of these communities, where particular logic, codified in mythologies over millenia, acted as a framework for comprehending and controling the universe.