Abstract
Besieged in Pernambuco by the Portuguese, the Dutch issued in 1645 and 1646, to pay their soldiers, the first coin inscribed “BRASIL”. Named obsidional, it is said to have been fabricated by melting either African gold or gold tableware. It is only in 1694 that the Brazilian itinerant mint was created in Bahia, and successively closed and transferred to Rio de Janeiro in 1698, to Pernambuco in 1700, and back to Rio de Janeiro in 1702. This itinerary is related to the exhaustion of the local metal supplies, until the discovery of gold in Brazil in the late 1600s. SR-XRF analyses of a small set of coins issued by the Dutch West Indies Company and the first Rio de Janeiro mint show the use of different gold alloys and the ratios of trace elements allow advancing several assumptions on the provenance of the gold.
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