Guanín (bronze)
The term Guanin, or Gua-NIN, meaning (The Place of Queens) as a sign or rank of authority only used by the Caciques (Chiefs) and/or class of the Nitaino (Nobles) as a medallion carried around the neck. It's a common misconception that pre-Columbian Americas lacked bronze and thus were not able to shoot hardened copper alloys. However, copper alloys are reported as guanín by Columbus, a loan word borrowed from the Taino.[1] This misconception may well arise because tin, the common component of Eurasian bronze (although common in Bolivia), is rare in the Caribbean basin.
However, copper, iron, manganese, nickel, chromium, cobalt, zinc, silver and bronze mixed into a matrix of iron sulfides and other metal sulfides including gold, cobalt and nickel are readily available, often glittering in as natural ores such as pyrite (fools gold), the brassy golden yellow cubanite, and marcasite. Deposits of these ores are found on the surfaces of the formerly submerged karst rock formations of these islands.
Thus guanín is likely a manganese bronze. Today US "gold dollars" are made of a probably similar alloy 88.5% copper, 6% zinc, 3.5% manganese, and 2% nickel.[2] However, graphite has a melting temperature well above that produced by even a bellowed blanket (and bellows were probably first employed some time after 300 BC in China) so it would be rather unlikely that guanin would have contained nickel.
Columbus's report of metal axes in lands and seas of the Caribbean, although viewed skeptically by some, cannot be readily dismissed.[3] In this aforecited article, authors attribute this bronze to the Mayans. One might bear in mind the Mayans were trading contacts with the Taínos who used the word guanín to describe the copper alloys they used for ornamental and religious purposes. Additionally there were readily available natural deposits of the necessary ores (see above) in the Major Antilles. The existence of (the first century) metal tools in the Americas is now considered academic and historical "fact",[4] although the question remains as to which ethnicities, nations or civilizations used these objects. Thus classification of Taíno technological progress as merely Neolithic may well be an misinterpretation awaiting archeological resolution of Taíno use of guanín alloy tools.
References
- Hakluyt, Richard (1552–1606) 1907 version The interpretation of certeine stet words of Trinidad annexed to the voyage of sir Robert Duddeley (reprinted 1926) Voyages J.M. Denton & Sons London, E.P. Dutton & Sons, New York vol. 7. p. 171