Mesoamerican Silver Bells: New Data on Proto-Tarascan Archeometallurgy
Author(s): Isabel Medina-González; Manuel E. Espinosa-Pesqueira; Gregory Pereira
Year: 2016
Summary
Silver is fairly uncommon in Mesoamerican archaeology, if compared with copper and gold, both of them materials that have been widely studied particularly in relation to the development of Western Mexican Pre-columbian cultures. Henceforth, material and technological aspects regarded Mesoamerican silver metal-work are still widely unknown. This paper presents the initial results on a interdisciplinary research based on state of the art analytical techniques (XRD, SEM-EDX-XRF) on a couple of bells made of silver alloy which were recently discovered in Malpaís Prieto, (Zacapu, Michoacan, Mexico), an archaeological site ascribed to Proto-Tarascan Uacusecha peoples. The investigation discusses previous information about Pre-Columbian silver artefacts in order to set the newly obtained data up within the framework of the metallurgic regional model of Western Mesoamerica.
Cite this Record
Mesoamerican Silver Bells: New Data on Proto-Tarascan Archeometallurgy. Isabel Medina-González, Manuel E. Espinosa-Pesqueira, Gregory Pereira. Presented at The 81st Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Orlando, Florida. 2016 ( tDAR id: 405045)
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Keywords
General
Archaeometallurgy
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Proto-Tarascan
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Silver
Geographic Keywords
Mesoamerica
Spatial Coverage
min long: -107.271; min lat: 12.383 ; max long: -86.353; max lat: 23.08 ;