What herb did they use to mix with the water and salt?

Name: Depletion gilding: Goldmaking techniques of the ancient Colombians
Uploaded: 2014-07-01T21:00:59Z
Description: Depletion gilding (dorado por oxidación). The gold-making techniques of the ancient Colombians. © Trustees of the British Museum

Okay so I looked this up because I thought this was an interesting question what I found was that the "Indians" used a herb called Oxalis Pubescens that contains oxalic acid. This is a very old and not commonly used way of depletion gilding the most common and somewhat modern ways are using all salt and packing the copper/silver/gold alloy (I put silver in because this was also used but the Colombians used copper and gold) in the salt, another very common but modern way is to use acids but modern acids like nitric acid or hydrochloric acid. With all of these techniques you mix them with water. I hope this helped.

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Course: The British Museum > Unit 2

Lesson 1: South America

Depletion gilding: Goldmaking techniques of the ancient Colombians

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Depletion gilding (dorado por oxidación). The gold-making techniques of the ancient Colombians. © Trustees of the British Museum. Created by British Museum.

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j shi
Posted 9 years ago. Direct link to j shi's post “What herb did they use to...”
What herb did they use to mix with the water and salt?
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(5 votes)
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- Coleman M. Vaughn: Hot Topic Studios
  Posted 8 years ago. Direct link to Coleman M. Vaughn: Hot Topic Studios's post “Okay so I looked this up ...”
  Okay so I looked this up because I thought this was an interesting question what I found was that the "Indians" used a herb called Oxalis Pubescens that contains oxalic acid. This is a very old and not commonly used way of depletion gilding the most common and somewhat modern ways are using all salt and packing the copper/silver/gold alloy (I put silver in because this was also used but the Colombians used copper and gold) in the salt, another very common but modern way is to use acids but modern acids like nitric acid or hydrochloric acid. With all of these techniques you mix them with water. I hope this helped.
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  (6 votes)
Mike Gutfeldt
Posted 10 years ago. Direct link to Mike Gutfeldt's post “At 1:43 it says "the meta...”
At
1:43
it says "the metal smiths ground an herb to obtain an acid, which they mixed with boiling water and salt." Did they achieve this intricate procedure through much trial and error?
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- Shaunak Joshi
  Posted 8 years ago. Direct link to Shaunak Joshi's post “they definitely used a lo...”
  they definitely used a lot of trial and error. I can't imagine looking through an entire square mile, until i found the right herb.
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  (0 votes)

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