Goldworking processes and ontologies at the inception of metallurgy in Western Mediterranean

Resumen del trabajo presentado en la 6th Archaeological Conference of Central Germany: Early Gold and Silver, celebrada en Halle (Alemania), del 17 al 19 de octubre de 2013
Concerning archaeometallurgy, gold stands as an “easy metal” of not much interest for the technological development of metallurgy, the underpinnings of western industrial revolution. This panorama is beginning to change. Gold entails a great amount of social, ideological and technical information on past societies, very different from what copper or bronze offers. In this lecture I will show how to extract this information with interdisciplinary methodologies and an adequate theoretical frame. Early processes of innovation, tradition and appropriation constitute some of the mechanisms of acquiring/ consolidating power in past societies. Metallurgical expertise was an extremely powerful weapon that ended in the hands of a leader or an elite and technological knowledge and skills were controlled and restricted acting upon the production and consumption relations, but also upon technological knowledge. For this reason it is not surprising that expertise in dealing with copper based alloys could differ from expertise in dealing with gold, as they play different roles in the consumption pattern. We will try to picture how the technological processes change and were transmitted, adopted and adapted in the long term over the Western Mediterranean area, specially in the Iberian peninsula where very different technological domain systems coexist. The Atlantic and the Mediterranean domains developed their own ontologies concerning gold, and produced objects of beauty. They can help elucidate underlying social and economic processes by delving into the reasons behind technological decision-making. New recent finds will help to accomplish this task.