But even if a chief *could* afford a saw for such use (circumstances where an axe would do the job, though less efficiently), wouldn't it still be cheaper to pay two stickpickers to use axes instead of one stickpicker to use a (valubale, fragile) saw?
AIUI, often when we say that such-and-such a culture "didn't have" a particular technology, we just mean that what they had wasn't economically viable. So here--it might be that they "have saws", but the expense of making/using saws is so great that it isn't worth it to use them, when you have the alternative of spending more time using inferior (but vastly cheaper) tools.
One other thought--Because a saw is so difficult to sharpen (compared to an axe), the disadvantage of bronze against iron is going to be much greater with saws than with axes. If, say, you need to sharpen your tool after every tree, that's going to be a relatively quick job with an axe, but ridiculously time-consuming with a saw.
And aside from iron being very expensive, it's going to tend to screw up your forestry/woodworking magic, which doesn't help matters. I think it all adds up to saws being a specialized tool, for circumstances where an axe just *can't* do the job.
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