Spanish colonial and indigenous platinum: a historical account of technology and fabrication

Abstract

The pre-Columbian Indians of Ecuador and Colombia were the first people to make use of native platinum. The dating of this metallurgy is difficult but it probably goes back to the early centuries Be and continues at least until AD 800. The Indians made use of sintering in the production of their platinum-gold alloys, some of which are plated with platinum over gold by the process of diffusion bonding of small platinum grains to the gold surface. This pre-Hispanic platinum metallurgy has no parallel in the Old World, where platinum remained unknown and unused in any quantity until the scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries began to investigate its properties. The Spanish platinum industry and the attempts of French and Spanish scientists to make use of the metal are briefly discussed.