Before the arrival of the Spanish conquest in South America, the Muisca culture (Chibra Indians) spread here since the 10th century. They lived in the territory of modern Colombia, high in the mountains, on a huge plateau located at an altitude of 2,700 meters above sea level.
The area of the plateau was rather big - 30,000 square kilometers. Here archaeologists have discovered many settlements of this civilization. And one of them is Buritika, which was built right at the intersection of several trade routes of that time.
Residents of Buritika mined and processed gold. In most cases, the Indians mined loose gold by processing gravel at the bottom and bank of the river. For this, a special stick was used, with an end fired for strength.
The resulting rock was pulled out, then sieved to determine the gold-bearing residue, and then washed on a wooden tray. The Indians preferred to work in the dry season - the rest of the time, the work was hampered by the huge amount of local rains.
The first information about gold mining by Indians is found in the writings of Pedro Cieso de Leone, in the Chronicle of Peru, which was written back in 1553.
The author described a special bowl in one of the Indian houses, which was used to rinse the resulting grains of gold. And the gold itself was mined from the river using sticks, after which they softened the resulting breed with clubs.
Promotional video:
Back in 1513, Vasco Nunez de Balboa, the Spanish conquistador, reported to the Spanish ruler that, in his opinion, the Indians mined gold in at least two ways.
In the first case, they expect high-flowing rivers, and when the river subsides and dries up, the gold that was washed away from the mountain responses remains on the surface in the form of large grains. They collect it. According to the conquistador, such "grains" could well have reached the size of an orange or a fist.
Another method was that the Indians waited for the grass to dry out in the mountains, after which they set it on fire, and then, when everything burned out, they found a large amount of gold in the form of nuggets. It is believed that the Indians stored their gold in rods of bird feathers.
Gold in those days served as a unit of exchange. And the Indians used cocoa beans as a weight. Archaeologists have discovered a huge amount of developed quartz veins in the northwest of the plateau. The researchers found that here the Indians dug narrow pits, less than a meter in diameter.
And all of them led at different angles to quartz veins. The resulting ore was crushed in stone mills, after which gold was separated from quartz.
According to the records of the Spanish conquistadors, sometimes the Indians smelted vein gold in order to separate it from other impurities. The methods and equipment of the Indians made it possible to do this right at the place of gold mining.
On the territory of Buritika, archaeologists have discovered many small smelters, forges, crucibles, etc. In order to obtain heat, the Indians used blower tubes.
Sometimes the obtained gold was improved by the method of "languishing metal" - it was heated together with salt and clay. As a result, the chlorides volatilized, leaving almost pure gold. This method was not previously known to European metallurgists.