Gold by Rebecca Zorach

Gold by Rebecca Zorach

Author:Rebecca Zorach
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books


Moche peanut bead necklace, Tomb I, Sipán, Peru, c. 300 CE. Gold, silver and copper.

By the late Inca period artisans brought from all over the empire’s conquered territories were making huge quantities of precious metal objects – so much so that archaeologists have found numerous discarded metal objects in excavated refuse pits.12 The Inca possessed a sophisticated trade network and political structure. Though they had no written language that was recognizable as such by Europeans (unlike Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs), they used knotted strings called quipu for record keeping, and these knots may have encoded words as well as numerical information. The Inca seem to have carried on the associations of the three metals developed by their predecessors in the Andes. While only traces of Andean gold survived the Spanish Conquest, we know from contemporary accounts that Inca temple walls were clad in gold and silver and endowed with life-sized golden statues and other objects.13 Pedro de Cieza de León wrote in his seventeenth-century Chronicle of Peru that in the temple of the Sun god, Coricancha, in Cusco,

They had also a garden, the clods of which were made of pieces of fine gold; and it was artificially sown with golden maize, the stalks, as well as the leaves and cobs, being of that metal . . . Besides all this, they had more than twenty golden sheep [probably llamas] with their lambs, and the shepherds with their slings and crooks to watch them, all made of the same metal.14



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