>>120058610Right, but that's all the more reason it's dumb to try to fit Mesoamerican civilizations into labels like Neolithic/Stone Age, Bronze Age, etc: Those were invented to periodize European and Near Eastern history, not as technological stages, they aren't applicable in describing the technological or social evolution of other areas, especially in the Americas.
That being said Mesoamerica DOES actually have a pretty direct analog to the Neolithic period, which is the Mesoamerican Archaic period, where complex tools, agriculture, sedentary society, etc becomes the norm in the region. It's just that when the region developed large scale archecture, urbanism, class systems (1400BC), Writing (900BC) formal governments (500BC), etc from , it did so without developing metal tools at the same time, unlike in the Eurasian West.
They DID however have metallurgy: Gold/Silver/Copper metallurgy shows up at 600AD, but by then you already had massive cities like Teotihuacan (see pic, has some accuracy issues but it's mostly right) with 100,000+ denizens, plumbing systems, etc that would have made even larger roman cities jealous, and bronze metallurgy pops up just before European contact is made at around 1300AD, but even then there's not much indication it got used much for tools, weapons, or armor. There's a few accounts and depictions here and there, but it wasn't done on a widespread basis, probably because unlike Eurasian civilizations, which developed their entire civilization's infrastructure around metals, Mesoamerica already had that and functioned without factoring metal in, so incorporating it as a utilitiarian substance probably wasn't as obvious.
There's also the matter that apparently a major driver in making bronze/copper smithing go from just a thing for ceremonial objects to for tools/weapons in Eurasia was using metal bands to band the outside ring of wheels on carts, and obviously without beasts of burden Mesoamerica didn't have carts.
