Was the mask “find” all a hoax, as some suspected?
This story, the way it was originally presented, then cut and pasted and retold across the media, really is a messy fictional storm almost void of facts altogether. But the confusion only starts there.
While Torres says the mask is Inca, right after that he says “it might be the first evidence of smelting” in South America. But that was thousands of years before the Inca formed. Searching for hard facts, clarity can be found in an excellent research paper, Metallurgy in Southern South America , written by three of the world’s leading scholars on ancient metallurgy; Colin A. Cooke, Mark B Abbott, and Alexander P. Wolfe. The scientists state , “The earliest evidence to date for smelting activity in southern South America comes in the form of copper slag from the Wankarani site in the highlands of Bolivia dating between 900 and 700 BCE (Ponce 1970).”
Accepting the work of these three experts, the very oldest the mask can be is 2,500 years old. But the symbology does not match the iconography of any South American cultures at this time and is classically Inca . All things considered, the mask was probably made between six and eight hundred years ago.
Another really important aspect that must be considered is an ‘omission’ or ‘miss-truth’ in the report, in the claim that the inclusion of iridium in the mask must have come from a meteorite - this is simply not true. David A. Scott from the Institute of Archaeology, University of London, wrote a seminal paper in 1980 called Ancient Platinum Technology in South America Its use by the Indians in Pre-Hispanic Times . One of his key findings , which is known by all metallurgists, is that the occurrence of iridium as ‘small inclusions’ in ancient gold work “were not deliberate alloying additions, but are frequently found in alluvial deposits associated with gold.”
Scott concluded that gold found in ‘placer deposits’ gives rise to “the unintentional presence of platinoid inclusions, particularly of the iridium-osmium-ruthenium group.” Thus, the inclusion of iridium in the Inca mask found in Florida is accidental, and the Inca metal workers knew nothing about its presence. Therefore, the whole idea that the mask must have come from a “special Inca tomb” is based on an assumption.
https://nexusnewsfeed.com/article/ancient-mys...ure-hoard/
This story, the way it was originally presented, then cut and pasted and retold across the media, really is a messy fictional storm almost void of facts altogether. But the confusion only starts there.
While Torres says the mask is Inca, right after that he says “it might be the first evidence of smelting” in South America. But that was thousands of years before the Inca formed. Searching for hard facts, clarity can be found in an excellent research paper, Metallurgy in Southern South America , written by three of the world’s leading scholars on ancient metallurgy; Colin A. Cooke, Mark B Abbott, and Alexander P. Wolfe. The scientists state , “The earliest evidence to date for smelting activity in southern South America comes in the form of copper slag from the Wankarani site in the highlands of Bolivia dating between 900 and 700 BCE (Ponce 1970).”
Accepting the work of these three experts, the very oldest the mask can be is 2,500 years old. But the symbology does not match the iconography of any South American cultures at this time and is classically Inca . All things considered, the mask was probably made between six and eight hundred years ago.
Another really important aspect that must be considered is an ‘omission’ or ‘miss-truth’ in the report, in the claim that the inclusion of iridium in the mask must have come from a meteorite - this is simply not true. David A. Scott from the Institute of Archaeology, University of London, wrote a seminal paper in 1980 called Ancient Platinum Technology in South America Its use by the Indians in Pre-Hispanic Times . One of his key findings , which is known by all metallurgists, is that the occurrence of iridium as ‘small inclusions’ in ancient gold work “were not deliberate alloying additions, but are frequently found in alluvial deposits associated with gold.”
Scott concluded that gold found in ‘placer deposits’ gives rise to “the unintentional presence of platinoid inclusions, particularly of the iridium-osmium-ruthenium group.” Thus, the inclusion of iridium in the Inca mask found in Florida is accidental, and the Inca metal workers knew nothing about its presence. Therefore, the whole idea that the mask must have come from a “special Inca tomb” is based on an assumption.
https://nexusnewsfeed.com/article/ancient-mys...ure-hoard/
