Recent archeological fieldwork on the north coast of Peru permits a preliminary reconstruction of a prill-extraction copper and copper alloy smelting process heretofore undocumented in the New World. The process was applied on a large scale during the late pre-Hispanic period. This study provides strong support for the claim that central Andean metallurgy constituted one of the major independent metallurgical traditions of the world.Izumi Shimada 1, Stephen Epstein 2, and Alan K. Craig 3; 1 Assistant professor of anthropology at Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 085442 Graduate student in the Department of Anthropology and research assistant at the Museum Applied Science Center for Archaeology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia 19104; 3 Professor of geography at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton 33431
