Can gold be analyzed and determined where it originated from? Does all gold break down the same, or is it slightly different at a molecular level from location to location? It would be interesting to know where their gold came from. It would be fun to find out if some of it may have come from the Americas.
Gold’s got a fairly high melting point (~1948 F) and is easy to separate from its ores; when found mingled with copper, the melting points are similar. And it’s no joke getting an ancient furnace that hot. Luckily, gold was often found (or at least used) in mostly pure form; the non-gold contaminants can be used to figure out the original locality, and that means the dating of the artifact is done by proxy data (typically, RC dating of organic materials from the mine, if there was one).