Thanks ProtectOurFreedom.
Posted on 09/26/2022 8:41:03 PM PDT by logi_cal869
Toxic levels of a pollutant commonly associated with the wastes of modern industry have been uncovered amid the most unlikely of archaeological sites. Long before conquistadors from far-off lands introduced the decay of war and disease, Maya cultures were dusting the soils of their urban centers with the heavy metal mercury.
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"Discovering mercury buried deep in soils and sediments in ancient Maya cities is difficult to explain, until we begin to consider the archaeology of the region which tells us that the Maya were using mercury for centuries."
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Perhaps the most widely used form of mercury through the ages is the crystal mercury sulfide, a mineral also known as cinnabar.
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By the time the Maya were raising monuments to their gods across the land around the third century CE, cinnabar was already in common use, mostly in its powdered form to add color to decorative pieces, or even in burials. On rare occasions, the purified metal itself has been uncovered, usually in association with ritual caches or elite funerals. Just how the Maya got their hands on this purified form of the element – whether through trade or their own methods of chemistry – is still something of a mystery. To what extent this liberal dusting of mercury sulfide affected the health of the Maya also isn't entirely yet clear, though a growing body of studies indicates the toxic metal was in the very least making its way deep into their bones. One of the last rulers of the Maya city of Tikal, a king called Dark Sun, was notably obese, a potential clue to a metabolic disease commonly caused by mercury poisoning.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Link to full paper below:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2022.986119/full
They were using it to recover gold just as the Incas used it duuuhhh Andes are full of ancient Inca cinnabar ore mines
Ping Sunken Civ...
Thanks ProtectOurFreedom.
Or maybe it was Incas, don’t remember.
Don't fault the researchers. They have to play ball.
It's the hard science which intrigued me.
No mystery!
When I was in 5th grade, I heated some cinnabar in a test tube, over an open flame, to yield a few droplets of liquid mercury.
One can even use the heat of a magnifying glass.
Bad reporter -> bad reporting.
Regards,
On August 1, 1774, an experiment conducted by the British clergyman Joseph Priestley focused sunlight on mercuric oxide (Cinnabar) contained in a glass tube, which liberated a gas he named “dephlogisticated air”. He noted that candles burned brighter in the gas and that a mouse was more active and lived longer while breathing it. After breathing the gas himself, Priestley wrote: “The feeling of it to my lungs was not sensibly different from that of common air, but I fancied that my breast felt peculiarly light and easy for some time afterwards.” Priestley published his findings in 1775 in paper titled “An Account of Further Discoveries in Air”, which was included in the second volume of his book titled Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air. Because he published his findings first, Priestley is usually given priority in the discovery of Oxygen.
And politically correct “ long before the conquistadors intro Ed the decay of war and disease…”. I think war and disease were producing decay long before the Conquistadors showed up.
Some cinnabar and elemental mercury finds at Maya settlements have been associated with evidence of burning, and some archaeologists have hypothesised that these remains may reflect elemental mercury being derived (presumably by high-temperature heating and capture) from cinnabar. Subsequent claims that the elemental mercury located at Maya settlements came from the Maya smelting cinnabar (e.g., Looper, 2003) are yet to be substantiated and there is (to date) no archaeological record of elemental mercury production from cinnabar burning in Classic Maya society. Heating cinnabar ore in a sealed vessel, as proposed, to produce elemental mercury using conventional Maya vessels would be difficult due to the very high temperatures required, sufficient air flow and the specific vessel design required to capture gaseous Hg0 in such a way that elemental Hg could be collected with any degree of success. The earliest records we have of cinnabar smelting with retorts in the region show that it was underway by the mid-16th century in Mexico, using approaches imported to “New Spain” from Europe, possibly Germany. Barba and Herrera (1988) describe a small object recovered from San Jose Ixtapa, Mexico which may have been used in liberating elemental mercury from cinnabar, but this technology probably dates from after the Maya Classic period.I'm not suggesting ignorance on the part of the researchers, but the reporter appeared to either have actually read the paper or interviewed a researcher.Instead of smelting, element mercury found at Maya sites may have come from some of the known geological sources of elemental mercury that are co-located with other mercury mineral deposits on the periphery of the Maya world, in present-day Mexico and Honduras, and possibly in the highlands of southern Guatemala (though sources here have not been confirmed) (Pendergast, 1982). It is difficult to envisage a means of elemental mercury collection, transport, and trade across long distances, though it would not have been an impossible achievement by the Maya. We agree with Pendergast’s (1982) observation that this may have been a painstaking and difficult process ensuring that elemental mercury was rare and highly prized. Additionally, we note it is may have been possible that interstitial Hg0 associated with mercury minerals found in mines, could be liberated by moderate heating of samples to release elemental mercury for collection from the mineral surface. Further, there are records globally of pre-Modern era elemental mercury production by simply burning cinnabar ore on brushwood fires, and then collecting pools of elemental mercury from the ashes (Farrar and Williams, 1977; Greenwood and Earnshaw, 2012):
HgS(s)+O2(g)→Hg(1)+SO2(g)
This simple approach is one that could have been employed by the Maya to obtain elemental mercury, and if so, there would be little or no physical trace of this in the archaeological record over a millennium later. With no contemporary accounts or archaeological data to draw on, the exact means by which the Maya obtained elemental mercury may only be speculated on at this time.
It's a good paper; you should read it. These folks are actually doing hard science. It's what really impressed me about this story. Been awhile, ya know?
Cinnabar is mercury sulfide, HgS. Priestly used mercuric oxide, HgO. Mercuric oxide can occur in nature as the rare mineral montroydite, but it’s usually made synthetically.
Yeah, no war or disease until the Euros showed up. Those bastards!
From Gold extraction.
Even today Mercury is used in 3rd world countries to extract Gold.
I thought it was because they had runners delivering fresh fish from the ocean.
For me, for later, from the most recent links on the Archaeology mag news site:
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