Cortés literally praised the metalworking of the Purepécha which he turned to making cannons as better than European cannon-makers. Bronze Age is a historiographical term for a distinct period in the archaeological record. It should not be applied like this. They did not have "bronze age metallurgy". Europeans also made cannons with bronze, was that bronze age metallurgy too? Come on. I'm trying not to express my frustration at you specifically here, so I apologize if I'm coming off harshly, but at this point I have had this argument so many times. Yeah, the term has real historical value, and this is not that value. If you want to use archaeological terminology, Mesoamerica was in the late postclassic, which is the proper term for it.
Sorry for frustrating you, but I must at least defend myself thus far:
My understanding is that "Bronze Age" does not mean "stupid" or "objectively bad at metalworking." My understanding is that the term means "has substantial copper-based metalworking, but does not have a robust tradition of
specifically iron metalworking."
I sincerely do not know whether Cortez's Purepécha-made guns were made out of brass, bronze, some other copper alloy, or out of iron. Given that the Purepécha expertise and experience would likely have lent itself to the first three rather than the last, and that in European experience of the time a bronze cannon was preferable anyway (but more expensive), I'm guessing "copper alloy of some kind."
What I do know, or rather know that I do not know, is this. I know of no reason to expect that Cortez would
not have been impressed by the skill of bronze-crafting experts at making bronze objects had he been transported, not to Mesoamerica, but to some historical Eurasian center of bronze working from antiquity. This is not an area where progress is necessarily linear, and it may well be that people were casting bronze rams for war galleys more expertly in the Mediterranean of 500 BCE than they were casting bronze cannon in 1500 CE.
I do not know how 1500-era European copper/bronze/brass/etc metallurgy compared to that of other times and places
in Eurasia. The observation that the Mesoamericans were better at such metallurgy than Europeans does not surprise me, since to Mesoamericans it was the dominant known form of metallurgy (along with working in gold and silver, of course). Meanwhile, to Europeans, it was a sideline, as their economy and metalworking traditions had so heavily shifted to favor iron.
...
From where I sit, to some extent, you appear to be projecting opinions onto me, and then becoming irritated with me when my use of what
so far as I know is relatively non-derogatory language 'proves' to you that I am implicitly holding those opinions.
I would understand if I were using a phrase like "the Aztecs were in the Stone Age" or "Dark Age Europe," because that has a history of being used as a 'haha, what primitives.'
My honest impression is that 'Bronze Age' largely does not have such a history of being used as an insult, though.
Still, I suppose I should either memorize the separate set of terms applied to pre-conquest American civilizations' historical periods. Or possibly just never participate in conversations regarding those civilizations again, and stop trying to follow them in enough detail to make participation appealing.
I've been feeling a bit fatigued lately of trying to jump through hoops, for reasons that have nothing to do with this conversation, and the option that involves jumping through fewer hoops has a certain attractiveness to it.