From Jalisco, Mexico, to Quimistán, Honduras: Analyzing Mesoamerican Metals from the Field Museum

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Twenty Years of Archaeological Science at the Field Museum’s Elemental Analysis Facility" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Copper artifacts were prominent in Mesoamerica during the last precolonial millennium, more widely distributed than silver and gold. Mesoamerican copper was formed into axes, axe-monies, rings, pendants, bells, and needles, among other artifacts. The most used alloy in this region was copper-arsenic, and there are two metallurgical traditions identified. The first, found in north and west Mexico, connected to North American cold hammering and annealing, and the other in central Mexico and southeastern Mesoamerica, which incorporated South American cold hammering, annealing casting, and lost wax methods. This paper is an overview of an ongoing characterization project via portable-XRF and laser ablation–inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometry involving copper artifacts held at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. The results show that close to half of the artifacts are pure copper, and the rest are copper-based alloys, with Cu-Sn and Cu-As being the most prominent. Gold and silver were also found in one artifact each. The alloy mixtures seem to be related to the provenience and the type of artifact analyzed. This information and conclusions will contribute to the ongoing discussion on the use and distribution of copper-based artifacts in Mesoamerica and the rest of the continent.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Twenty Years of Archaeological Science at the Field Museum’s Elemental Analysis Facility   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38229.0