โ Scribed by Dorothy Hosler
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
In Quest of Mineral Wealth: Aboriginal and Colonial Mining and Metallurgy in Spanish America is a volume resulting from a 1991 Symposium on Latin American Mining at the International Congress of Americanists in New Orleans. All but two of the 19 articles deal with mining and metallurgy. Part 1 treats the period prior to the Spanish invasion and contains five articles. Apart from several articles dealing with other New World Areas, Part 2 (Colonial) is nearly equally divided between Mexican colonial period silver mining, relations between Mexican and European mining, and colonial period silver mining of the Andean region.
Part 1 begins with Robert West's short nontechnical overview of aboriginal metallurgy and metalworking. West traces the south-north movement of New World metallurgy, and then summarizes some aspects of prehispanic smelting techniques, and of pyrotechnology, Dr. West maps ''possible diffusion routes'' for metallurgy (Figure 1), reconstructed from the work of many scholars. These routes make overall sense in terms of artifact types, styles, and dates. The quality and kind of data available to reconstruct these routes vary considerably. For example, certain areas lack baseline studies of compositions/fabrication methods of dated artifact assemblages (Central Mexico, Oaxaca, Guatemalan highlands, southern Andes), which weakens the argument for historical relations among those regions. Future research, including provenience studies using lead isotope analyses currently underway for Ecuadorian, Peruvian, and Mexican copper ores and copper-based artifacts (Hosler and Macfarlane, 1996) will clarify the nature and timing of these historical connections.
Graffan, Rivera, and Carevic's discussion of Ramaditas, a Late Formative Period single-component Atacama desert site in Chile, provides a singular and major contribution to our understanding of Andean metal production during this period. The authors have recovered and analyzed evidence (slag, furnaces, crushed ore, sheet metal artifacts) for on-site copper production at what appears to be a small permanent village. Analyses of slags, containing copper in very low concentrations, indicate hightemperature smelting regimes, resulting in effective separation of metal from slag. Antlerite and bronchite (copper sulfide ores) were found associated with surface slags and furnace remains. These ores probably constituted parent material for the copper artifacts, corroborating previous work indicating a long Andean tradition involving the smelting of copper sulphide ores (Lechtman, 1980). Their data also provide a new, noncentralized model for southern Andean metal production.
Izumi Shimada's article, ''Prehispanic Metallurgy and Mining in the Andes, Recent Advances and Future Tasks,'' summarizes recent research in the Andes. Concerning future tasks, Dr. Shimada reiterates what archaeologists studying metallurgy generally advocate-that the fundamental job is to examine all facets of production. This
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