Montezuma’s treasure has been discovered? — Archaeologists confirm that it has.
Did Montezuma’s treasure really exist? Could a gold bar found in Mexico City be from the legendary treasure of the Aztecs?
When construction of the new headquarters of the Central Bank began in Mexico City in 1981, one of the workers found a gold bar in a mud-filled excavation nearly 5 meters deep. It weighed 1.93 kg, was 26.4 cm long, 5.4 cm wide, and only 1.4 cm thick. The local jeweler, to whom the bar was taken for appraisal, concluded that it was old gold.
The find was donated to Mexico’s Istituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia and for 39 years its origin remained a mystery. Only recently did archaeologists subject it to detailed examination to determine when and where it was made. How to find out how old it is and where the gold object came from?
It’s tricky; gold hardly oxidizes, which keeps it beautiful for millennia, but it also doesn’t form a layer that allows archaeologists to date it. Fortunately, pure gold was used very rarely in antiquity, silver and copper were added to it for better malleability. The proportions of these metals varied in different eras and different cultures. Aztec gold, for example, contained much less copper than Mayan or Mixtec gold.
