I have found lots of information on ancient smelting and forging of metal, but precious little on how these ancient people actually found the metal to work with. Most information points to meteor iron and bog/swamp iron, which yielded very small amounts. How did they (or did they even) prospect for iron veins in the earth, well before the invention of things like metal detectors.
In: Technology
It is almost impossible for metalworking civilizations to start with iron. Copper is a far easier metal to start with because it can be accidentally smelted. Put a copper bearing rock in a hot campfire, and it will bleed copper.
In addition to being pretty easy to smelt, copper is just hard enough that it is able to make fairly decent tools on its own. So before the Bronze Age started, there was almost certainly a very small copper age.
The copper age taught people that some rocks give metals when heated, which caused them to start experimenting with hotter fires and trying a bunch of different types of rock. This eventually lead to the production of more metals like tin and eventually iron.
Most likely the reason Native Americans never develop metalworking beyond gold working was because they’re just doesn’t happen to be enough copper deposits near the surface to have got them started.
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