High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Metallury in pre-Columbian America is the extraction and purification of metals, as well as creating metal alloys and fabrication with metal by Indigenous peoples of the Americas prior to European contact in the late 15th century. Indigenous Americans have been using native metals from ancient times, with recent finds of gold artifacts in the Andean region dated to 2155—1936 BCE. and North American copper finds dated to approximately 5000 BCE. The metal would have been found in nature without need for smelting techniques and shaped into the desired form using heat and cold hammering techniques without chemically altering it by alloying it. To date "no one has found evidence that points to the use of melting, smelting and casting in prehistoric eastern North America." In South America the case is quite different. Indigenous South Americans had full metallurgy with smelting and various metals being purposely alloyed. Metallurgy in Mesoamerica...