35
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
2 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      Ice-core evidence of earliest extensive copper metallurgy in the Andes 2700 years ago

      research-article

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisherPMC
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          The importance of metallurgy for social and economic development is indisputable. Although copper (Cu) was essential for the wealth of pre- and post-colonial societies in the Andes, the onset of extensive Cu metallurgy in South America is still debated. Comprehensive archaeological findings point to first sophisticated Cu metallurgy during the Moche culture ~200–800 AD, whereas peat-bog records from southern South America suggest earliest pollution potentially from Cu smelting as far back as ~2000 BC. Here we present a 6500-years Cu emission history for the Andean Altiplano, based on ice-core records from Illimani glacier in Bolivia, providing the first complete history of large-scale Cu smelting activities in South America. We find earliest anthropogenic Cu pollution during the Early Horizon period ~700–50 BC, and attribute the onset of intensified Cu smelting in South America to the activities of the central Andean Chiripa and Chavin cultures ~2700 years ago. This study provides for the first time substantial evidence for extensive Cu metallurgy already during these early cultures.

          Related collections

          Most cited references69

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: not found
          • Article: not found

          The composition of the continental crust

            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: found
            • Article: not found

            The history of South American tropical precipitation for the past 25,000 years.

            Long sediment cores recovered from the deep portions of Lake Titicaca are used to reconstruct the precipitation history of tropical South America for the past 25,000 years. Lake Titicaca was a deep, fresh, and continuously overflowing lake during the last glacial stage, from before 25,000 to 15,000 calibrated years before the present (cal yr B.P.), signifying that during the last glacial maximum (LGM), the Altiplano of Bolivia and Peru and much of the Amazon basin were wetter than today. The LGM in this part of the Andes is dated at 21,000 cal yr B.P., approximately coincident with the global LGM. Maximum aridity and lowest lake level occurred in the early and middle Holocene (8000 to 5500 cal yr B.P.) during a time of low summer insolation. Today, rising levels of Lake Titicaca and wet conditions in Amazonia are correlated with anomalously cold sea-surface temperatures in the northern equatorial Atlantic. Likewise, during the deglacial and Holocene periods, there were several millennial-scale wet phases on the Altiplano and in Amazonia that coincided with anomalously cold periods in the equatorial and high-latitude North Atlantic, such as the Younger Dryas.
              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: found
              • Article: not found

              A 350014C yr High-Resolution Record of Water-Level Changes in Lake Titicaca, Bolivia/Peru

              Sediment cores collected from the southern basin of Lake Titicaca (Bolivia/Peru) on a transect from 4.6 m above overflow level to 15.1 m below overflow level are used to identify a new century-scale chronology of Holocene lake-level variations. The results indicate that lithologic and geochemical analyses on a transect of cores can be used to identify and date century-scale lake-level changes. Detailed sedimentary analyses of subfacies and radiocarbon dating were conducted on four representative cores. A chronology based on 60 accelerator mass spectrometer radiocarbon measurements constrains the timing of water-level fluctuations. Two methods were used to estimate the14C reservoir age. Both indicate that it has remained nearly constant at ∼25014C yr during the late Holocene. Core studies based on lithology and geochemistry establish the timing and magnitude of five periods of low lake level, implying negative moisture balance for the northern Andean altiplano over the last 3500 cal yr. Between 3500 and 3350 cal yr B.P., a transition from massive, inorganic-clay facies to laminated organic-matter-rich silts in each of the four cores signals a water-level rise after a prolonged mid-Holocene dry phase. Evidence of other significant low lake levels occurs 2900–2800, 2400–2200, 2000–1700, and 900–500 cal yr B.P. Several of the low lake levels coincided with cultural changes in the region, including the collapse of the Tiwanaku civilization.
                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Journal
                Sci Rep
                Sci Rep
                Scientific Reports
                Nature Publishing Group
                2045-2322
                31 January 2017
                2017
                : 7
                : 41855
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Paul Scherrer Institut, CH-5232 Villigen PSI , Switzerland
                [2 ]Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern , CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland
                [3 ]Department for Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Bern , Freiestrasse 3, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland
                [4 ]UCL Institute of Archaeology, 31-34 Gordon Square , London WC1H 0PY, UK
                [5 ]College for Humanities and Social Sciences , HBKU Doha, Qatar
                Author notes
                Article
                srep41855
                10.1038/srep41855
                5282569
                28139760
                d81c1fc1-d6a7-44d4-b74c-56db935ad340
                Copyright © 2017, The Author(s)

                This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

                History
                : 04 October 2016
                : 04 January 2017
                Categories
                Article

                Uncategorized
                Uncategorized

                Comments

                Comment on this article

                scite_

                Similar content85

                Cited by8

                Most referenced authors326