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Sediment Alloys Indicate Pre-Incan Metallurgy

Submitted by bat400 on Thursday, 19 April 2007  Page Views: 1494

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These findings illustrate a way that archaeologists can recreate the past even when looters have destroyed the valuable artifacts that reveal historical secrets. Pre-Colonial bronze artifacts have previously been found in the central Peruvian Andes dating back to about 1000 AD, after the fall of the Wari or Huari civilization, before the Incas . However, it has been unclear how metallurgy had developed there, or whether or not these artifacts even came from the Andes, instead perhaps coming from trading with coastal villages.

"There's a lot you can't tell about history from the metal artifacts here because there's been a lot of looting, during both modern times and when the Spanish first arrived to melt down what silver and other metals were there to send back to the Spanish crown," said researcher Colin Cooke, an environmental scientist at the University of Alberta in Canada.

To recreate a millennium of metallurgical history, the scientists measured the concentrations of copper, lead, zinc, antimony, bismuth, silver and titanium in sediments from Laguna Pirhuacocha, a lake in the mining region of Morococha in Peru that metal pollutants from furnace smoke contaminated. The metals that Cooke, University of Pittsburgh environmental scientist Mark Abbott and their colleagues focused on are linked with certain metallurgical practices. For instance, a large rise in zinc and copper levels relative to lead concentrations suggest copper smelting, while increases in lead, antimony and bismuth hint at silver metallurgy. They used carbon dating and lead isotope dating to figure out when the metals inside mud samples from the bottom of the lake were deposited.

The scientists found the earliest evidence for metallurgy dated back to between 1000 and 1200 AD, after the fall of the Wari but well before the rise of the Inca. Metallurgy then seemed aimed toward copper and copper alloys.

For more see the Live Science story by Charles Q. Choi, posted: 19 April 2007.
Contributor Bio for bat400: Located in the Lower Ohio River Valley, United States.

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First Evidence Of Pre-industrial Mercury Pollution In The Andes by coldrum on Wednesday, 17 June 2009
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First Evidence Of Pre-industrial Mercury Pollution In The Andes

The study of ancient lake sediment from high altitude lakes in the Andes has revealed for the first time that mercury pollution occurred long before the start of the Industrial Revolution.

University of Alberta Earth and Atmospheric Sciences PhD student Colin Cooke's results from two seasons of field work in Peru have now provided the first unambiguous records of pre-industrial mercury pollution from anywhere in the world and will be published in the May 18th Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

"The idea that mercury pollution was happening before the industrial revolution has long been hypothesised on the basis of historical records, but never proven," said Cooke whose research was funded by the National Geographic Society.

Cooke and his team recovered sediment cores from high elevation lakes located around Huancavelica, which is the New World's largest mercury deposit. By measuring the amount of mercury preserved in the cores back through time, they were able to reconstruct the history of mercury mining and pollution in the region.

"We found that mercury mining, smelting and emissions go back as far as 1400 BC," said Cooke. "More surprisingly, mining appears to have began before the rise of any complex or highly stratified society. This represents a departure from current thinking, which suggests mining only arose after these societies emerged," said Cooke.

Initially, mercury pollution was in the form of mine dust, largely resulting from the production of the red pigment vermillion. "Vermillion is buried with kings and nobles, and was a paint covering gold objects buried with Andean kings and nobles," said Cooke. However, following Inca control of the mine in 1450 AD, mercury vapour began to be emitted.

"This change is significant because it means that mercury pollution could be transported over much greater distances, and could have been converted into methylmercury, which is highly toxic," said Cooke.

"All of these results confirm long-standing questions about the existence and magnitude pre-industrial mercury pollution, and have implications for our understanding of how mining and metallurgy evolved in the Andes," said Cooke.

Cooke is an interdisciplinary scientist researching human impacts on the environment. His research combines paleolimnology (the study of ancient lake sediments) with the fields of archaeology, and geochemistry. The research team included Prentiss Balcom from the University of Connecticut (USA), Harald Biester from the University of Braunschweig (Germany), and Alexander Wolfe from the University of Alberta.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090518172644.htm
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