Amalgamation and Alluvial Gold Mining at Ancient Sardis, Türkiye

Abstract

Even though gold was widely used in the ancient world there are few studies of the mining technology used to obtain the precious metal. Ancient Sardis is one of the most well-known of these ancient gold occurrences. At Sardis and elsewhere in the ancient world, gold was washed from alluvial occurrences using gravity methods combined with mercury (amalgamation), a method that is still used today in small-scale alluvial gold mines worldwide. The ‘Present is the Key to the Past’ allows us to examine modern gold mining in order to evaluate ancient methods. Given, that industrial amounts of gold are produced in only two ways, either by cyanide, which was first used in the 1880s in the US, or ages-old gravity separation/amalgamation, then amalgamation must be re-examined as the gold mining technology used to produce alluvial gold at ancient Sardis. Regional geology, geoarchaeology, and the evaluation of: 1) the availability of cinnabar, the ore of mercury; 2) an ancient mercury retort near Konya; 3) ancient use of cinnabar as a funeral pigment and as a source of mercury that was used for gilding and amalgamation; 4) the fine-grained alluvial gold at Sardis; and 5) the mercury content of Sardis’ alluvial gold (11,615 ppm Hg) and end-product gold, a Byzantine coin (<1 ppm Hg) are consistent with the conclusion that mercury amalgamation was the mining technology that supplied gold, as electrum, to ancient Sardis’ craftsmen.

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