David:
Thank you for your information. I will follow up some of the leads.
Unfortunately your message contained a break after sentence on radiodcarbon
dates.  Would appreciate your resending the missing material shown below.

Your comments about not being able to duplicate methods with centrifugal
casting is what led me to question the idea of simple gravity casting.
I have examined Costa Rican gold artifacts and have photographs of
Colombian gold.  The detail is too fine to be achieved by simple methods.
This is what led me to wonder if the Ashante approach using the crucible
attached to the mold would be a possibility. The Ashante are able to
reproduce fine detail and fill large thin areas with this approach.

I appreciate your help.

Fred

----- Original Message -----
From: David Scott (remote) <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, June 13, 1999 1:12 PM
Subject: Pre-Columbian gold casting -Reply


> Some simple, small casting moulds from the ancient Colombian region (this
is where casting was so well developed....not the Inca or Mayan regions as
one correspondent suggested) show a simple clay mould with two vents upwards
to each side of the mould....I think that often no complicated  gating
system was used, many small gold or tumbaga alloy castings could have been
made by this simple method, since the Colombian Indians had such a mastery
of gold alloy casting.  Multiple castings of the same shape could be made by
taking wax impressions from a carved stone master matrix (originally thought
to be for repousse working but this is a common error).  How exactly the
Colombians produced the larger masterpieces of ancient gold alloy casting
known as the Quimbaya treasure, might take some work, since these were
wonderfully controlled hollow lost-wax castings with chaplet holes later
plugged with matching gold plugs.  Some radiocarbon dates have been obtained
from these Colombian!
>   c!
SOMETHING MISSING HERE

> ores, since many are very charcoal-rich. Some ancient Peruvian castings
may have been from piece moulds rather than from lost-wax.  For example Dana
Goodburn-Brown examined an Inca mace-head and found many mould-lines,
showing that it had been cast in a multiple-piece mould.....there is not a
great deal of casting debris available for ancient South America, but those
that are suggest that metal was not cast in a crucible attached to the mould
and upended when the allloy was molten......so fine are some of the ancient
Colombian castings that when the El Dorado exhibition of 1979 took place,
modern casters were unable to cast replicas of Sinu false-filigree ear-rings
by centrifugal casting, not of course, the only time that modern attempts to
reproduce ancient technology failed to take into account the sophistication
of ancient empirical knowledge of materials and alloys.
>



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