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Converting Minerals to Metals
Published in Karlheinz Spitz, John Trudinger, Mining and the Environment, 2019
Karlheinz Spitz, John Trudinger
Mercury, one of the seven metals known to the ancients, was in the past widely used because of its ability to dissolve silver and gold. Also known as quicksilver, it is the only metal which is liquid at room temperature. Extraction from ore is most simply carried out by distillation as mercury compounds decompose and volatilize at moderate temperatures, to be readily recovered by condensation. Most of the mercury known to man originated from one mine. The Almadén deposit in Spain, exploited over 2000 years, contained over 30 percent of the world’s known reserves of mercury with a grade six times the global average for mercury mines.
Environmental Alchemy: Mercury-Gold Amalgamation Mining and the Transformation of the Earth
Published in Ambix, 2023
Much of this mercury came from the New Almaden mine outside of San Jose. There the New Almaden Quicksilver Mining Company exploited the region’s vast cinnabar deposits, producing over 1.7 million pounds of elemental mercury annually from 1850 to 1885.55 Around the mine and its large industrial complex – which included six large reduction furnaces and a railroad linking the mine and the furnaces – one visitor in 1857, William Vincent Wells (1826–1876), a Boston-born writer and journalist, described some of the local environmental effects: Despite the lofty chimneys, and the close attention that has been devoted to the secret of effectually condensing the volatile matter, its escape from the chimneys withers all green things around. Every tree on the mountain-side above the works is dead, and some of the more sensitive natures farther removed exhibit the influence of the poison in their shrunken and bleached foliage … . Cattle feeding within half a mile of the hacienda sicken, and become salivated; and the use of the waters of a spring rising near the works is guarded against.56The deleterious effects also extended to the mine’s labourers and all who lived in its shadow. “The workmen at the furnaces,” Wells wrote, “are particularly subjected to the poisonous fumes.” Even though they worked only one week out of four, “Pale, cadaverous faces and leaden eyes are the consequence of even these short spells … In such an atmosphere, one would seem to inhale death with every respiration.”57
The M de Jussieu’s ‘mirror of the Incas’: an ecuadorian archaeological artefact in the mineralogical collection of René-Just Haüy (1743-1822)
Published in Annals of Science, 2022
Godin and La Condamine were not the only ones to send or bring back material evidences of the ancient South American civilisations. I discovered through an indirect information from, Anne Claude Philippe de Caylus36, that the botanist Joseph de Jussieu: sent from Lima, a few years ago, to his brothers, one of whom was still alive37, a crate where, among several curiosities, he found pieces of gallinaceous stone, some worked, others raw.38Although Joseph was primarily a botanist, he also showed a great interest in the Natural Sciences in general and particularly in the Earth and Human Sciences. From the very beginning of the expedition, in Panama, he was attracted by metal deposits and their exploitation methods. Hence, he left the expedition for a while to visit gold mines near Portobelo.39 In 1739, while the triangulation campaigns continued in the province of El Oro (southern Ecuador), he escaped to visit the abandoned gold mines of Zaruma. In 1749, when he accompanied Godin on his way back through Buenos Aires (Argentina), every mining locality they passed through was an opportunity for visits and observations. From Lima on the Pacific coast, the two scientists went up the Andes mountain range to the hamlet of Poma-Cachau (Pacococha) where the silver mines of Hungracava are in operation.40 Following the Western Cordillera to the South, they stopped at Guancavellica (Huancavelica, Peru) to visit the galleries of the quicksilver mine.41 Joseph took the opportunity to study the different minerals present in the deposit: arsenopyrite, barite, cinnabar, galena, marcasite, quicksilver, orpiment and realgar42 and designed the furnace used to calcinate the ore. Their passage through Puma Cancha (Pomacancha, District of Jauja, Province of Junín) allowed Joseph to study the magnetic stone (magnetite) that constitutes the local mountains. Before separating, the two travellers also travelled through the region of the Lake Titicaca where Joseph visited silver mines.43 About Prehispanic archaeological objects shipments, I have found a possible explanation proposed by Lehir.44 Antoine de Jussieu, Joseph's brother, was interested by figurative stones of prehistoric origin discovered in recent geological formations. As a true precursor of Prehistory, he maintained that these were not natural products, but the result of human labour. And, supported his theories in front of the Academy by presenting stone instruments used by the American Indians.
Amalgamated Histories: Tracing Quicksilver's Legacy Through Environmental and Political Bodies in Andean and Amazonian Gold Mining
Published in Ambix, 2023
Sebastián Rubiano-Galvis, Jimena Diaz Leiva, Ruth Goldstein
In the Iberian extraction project, colonised peoples were more than labouring bodies, and interacted with Europeans on a number of different levels. Asymmetries of power notwithstanding, the Incan people contributed – some more willingly than others – to European knowledge about mercury mining and smelting. Church Fathers (Padres), mine overseers, refiners, and merchants who published texts about mining techniques, as well as the Spanish Crown's officials who adapted and implemented labour laws,38 all drew from Indigenous metallurgical knowledge in the Americas as well as from Roman antiquity. In this “contact zone,” different techniques for mercury amalgamation emerged. Research by environmental historians and historians of mining and technology in Latin America such as Saul Guerrero, Allison Bigelow, and Nicholas Robins show that different versions of the mercury amalgamation method developed in the 1550s in the Viceroyalty of New Spain (present-day Mexico), and spread across Spanish America undergoing modifications along the way.39 The Spanish merchant Bartolomé de Medina developed the so-called patio method (método del patio) to amalgamate silver with mercury. This consisted of four steps: crushing or stamping the ores to discard excess material; combining it with a mix of salt, water, copper sulphate, and mercury; stepping on the mixture in a shallow pit for six to eight weeks until an amalgam is formed; and heating the amalgam to vaporise the mercury and recover the silver. The colder Andean climate necessitated smelting at higher temperatures. Mercury's chemical affinity with gold and silver enabled refiners to profitably extract ores from a wider variety of deposits ranging from unmixed metals to various combinations of ferrous, cupric, and sulphuric elements.40 Medina is often credited as the sole inventor of the patio method; however, he worked in concert with “Indigenous miners, colonial agents, and Fugger agents stationed in Pachuca, Mexico.”41 Alonso de Barba, a physician and metallurgist working in Perú during the 1590s, developed a variation on the patio method, termed metodo de cajones.42 Barba improved the furnaces used to distill mercury from cinnabar (called jabecas), boosting Spanish imperial productivity by increasing the availability of quicksilver, and making gold and silver processing more efficient. Barba also developed the bucket method (metodo de los cazos), in which the amalgamation stage of the patio method was performed in buckets instead of open pits, a technique widely used in the Americas from the early seventeenth century to the nineteenth century.