Glad to have opend up the debate a little, but I disagree that the machete is purely a south american tool. As far as I am aware there was little or no iron and steel working in the Americas prior to the European colonial period. Thus the tool was a European introduction.
Prior to discovering the Americas the Europeans had already colonised or visited much of Asia and the Far , which did have a history of ironworking which probably spread from India in the west, and China and Japan in the east into the Pacific Rime countries.
One only has to look at the wide range of ethnographic weapons/tools in the Rijksmuseum (Museum Volkenkunde) at Leiden
http://www.rmv.nl/index.aspx?lang=en or
http://www.rmv.nl/zoek_collectie.asp...rchfor1=parang to see a wide range of Far Eastern machete type blades...
It is likely (not proven?) that the long blade proved more useful as a tool for clearing scrub and jungle than the traditional hooks shaped tools common in Europe (although not all European billhooks are concave, some are straight and some are convex) and coupled with the fact that the first colonisers of the Americas were accompanied by sailors, armed with cutlasses - it was a natural progression to take a proven tool to the new land... which is why both machetes and bilhooks are common in Central and Southern America...
The long, thin and relatively wide blade of a machete is not easy to forge, compared to a relatively short billhook, so it is likely it was not a common tool until after a cheap source of reliable steel was available to replace the steel welded to iron methods used to produce the billhook. By the time the right metal was available the methods of mass production were also being introduced into edge tool production, and in England, Sheffield and Birmingham were at the leading edge of technological advancement in cutlery and tool making in the world...
Many machetes have handle scales riveted directly to an extension of the blade, not common on traditional tools or weapons from either Spain or England (altough this method of handling is used on billhooks from Southern France and Italy - and on the cheap imported ones flooding in from India and China..).
I have not seen enough early machetes to see if they are handled with a tang as per swords, cutlasses (and many types of billhook)....
Two machete style blades with tanged handles can be seen at website for Old Tools in France,
http://outils-anciens.xooit.fr/t1883...r-une-lame.htm - the origins of both blades are uncertain....