• Complain

Rebecca Zorach - Gold: Nature and Culture

Here you can read online Rebecca Zorach - Gold: Nature and Culture full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2016, publisher: Reaktion Books, genre: Romance novel. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Rebecca Zorach Gold: Nature and Culture

Gold: Nature and Culture: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Gold: Nature and Culture" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

Gleaming and perfect, gold has beguiled humankind for many millennia, attracting treasure hunters, adorning the living and the dead, and symbolizing wealth, power, divinity, and eternity. This book offers a lively, critical look at the cultural history of this most regal metal, examining its importance across many cultures and time periods and the many places where it has been central, from religious ceremonies to colonial expeditions to modern science. Rebecca Zorach and Michael W. Phillips Jr. cast gold as a substance of paradoxes. Its softness at once makes it useless for most building projects yet highly suited for the exploration of form and the transmissionimportantlyof images, such as the faces of rulers on currency. It has been the icon of valuethe surest bet in times of uncertain marketsyet also of valuelessness, something King Midas learned the hard way. And, as Zorach and Phillips detail, it has been at the center of many clashes between cultures all throughout history, the unfortunate catalyst of countless blood lusts. Ultimately, they show that the questions posed by our relentless desire for gold are really questions about value itself. Lavishly illustrated, this book offers a shimmering exploration of the mythology, economy, aesthetics, and perils at the center of this simpleyet irresistiblesubstance.

Rebecca Zorach: author's other books


Who wrote Gold: Nature and Culture? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Gold: Nature and Culture — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Gold: Nature and Culture" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
GOLD The Earth series traces the historical significance and cultural - photo 1

GOLD

Picture 2

The Earth series traces the historical significance and cultural history of natural phenomena. Written by experts who are passionate about their subject, titles in the series bring together science, art, literature, mythology, religion and popular culture, exploring and explaining the planet we inhabit in new and exciting ways.

Series editor: Daniel Allen

In the same series

Air Peter Adey

Cave Ralph Crane and Lisa Fletcher

Desert Roslynn D. Haynes

Earthquake Andrew Robinson

Fire Stephen J. Pyne

Flood John Withington

Gold Rebecca Zorach and Michael W. Phillips Jr

Islands Stephen A. Royle

Lightning Derek M. Elsom

Meteorite Maria Golia

Moon Edgar Williams

South Pole Elizabeth Leane

Tsunami Richard Hamblyn

Volcano James Hamilton

Water Veronica Strang

Waterfall Brian J. Hudson

Gold

Rebecca Zorach and
Michael W. Phillips Jr

REAKTION BOOKS

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
Unit 32, Waterside
4448, Wharf Road
London N1 7UX, UK
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2016

Copyright Rebecca Zorach and Michael W. Phillips Jr 2016

All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and
Index match the printed edition of this book.

Printed and bound in China by 1010 Printing International Ltd

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

eISBN: 9781780236131

CONTENTS

Seated goddess with a child Hittite Empire central Anatolia c 14th13th - photo 3

Seated goddess with a child, Hittite Empire, central Anatolia, c. 14th13th century BCE.

Introduction: In Search of Gold

Gold has beguiled humankind from the earliest days of civilization. The most malleable of metals, and one of the most brilliant, it was fashioned early on into artful forms. Often found relatively unadulterated, it did not require sophisticated smelting techniques. Its softness rendered it largely useless for making tools (though modern science has found many uses for it): thus most of its earliest uses were decorative.

The uselessness of gold, and not its inherent beauty or nobility, may also have been what prompted its use as currency. Its relationship to value why it became such a highly prized medium for money is, perhaps, an unanswerable question. Did early human civilizations use gold for money because of qualities they prized in it or do we attribute precious qualities to it, fetishistically, because ancient convention, for reasons now obscured, decrees that we use it for money? It is also notable that throughout history gold has been used to represent the antithesis of true value in critiques of wealth and idolatry almost as much as it has compelled admiration. The questions posed by the human desire for gold are central questions about value itself and about meaning.

Gold is an element, one of the heavy metals. Unlike lighter elements, gold cannot be created by fusion within stars. Scientists now believe the gold in the universe likely came from collisions between dying stars (supernovas). The meteorite collisions that produced the gold humans mine took place a very long time ago. Gold deposits in the Witwatersrand region of South Africa the origin of 40 per cent of the gold ever mined from the earth are dated to 3 billion years old, 1.5 billion years younger than the earth. Compared to these events, any human encounter with the metal is quite recent. But humans have used gold since the dawn of our own history. It is found on every continent, and was among the first metals prehistoric peoples mined and used.

The Israelites worship the Golden Calf by the English illuminator William de - photo 4

The Israelites worship the Golden Calf, by the English illuminator William de Brailes, c. 1250, ink, pigment and gold on parchment.

Primary deposits of gold are found as particles or in veins lodged in minerals like basalt and granite and in rock formations called turbidites (sedimentary rock layers formed through the action of ancient oceans). The combination of gold and the rock that hosts it is called an ore; the gold contained in the rock is also called lode gold. Often, gold is found together with quartz and iron pyrite (also known as fools gold), and typically as a natural alloy with silver or copper. Nuggets of pure gold may be the result of the activity of bacteria. Scientists have studied two in particular, Delftia acidovorans and Cupriavidus metallidurans, which have a genetic resistance to the toxicity of heavy metals. They have been shown to dissolve gold into nanoparticles that can travel through sediment and may collect as nuggets.

Miners and their wives posing with the finders of the Welcome Stranger Nugget - photo 5

Miners and their wives posing with the finders of the Welcome Stranger Nugget, Richard Oates, John Deason and his wife, albumen silver carte-de-visite photograph, 1869.

The shiny nuggets we associate with the discovery of gold are typically found in placer deposits, dense concentrations of particles of gold eroded from rocks and deposited in the banks of rivers and streams. (Placer is a Spanish word for a sandbank.) The biggest nuggets, however, have been found in underground mines. The one that is probably the biggest ever found (at a refined weight of 71.018 kg), the Welcome Stranger, was found in Australia in 1858 and melted down in London in 1859. The Cana nugget, found in Para, Brazil, in 1983, may have been part of a nugget even larger than the Welcome Stranger, and is today the largest nugget in existence, containing 52.332 kg of gold.

Woodcut image of dowsing from Agricola De re metallica 1556 - photo 6

Woodcut image of dowsing, from Agricola, De re metallica (1556).

Gold-seekers have used some extraordinary techniques to discover hidden gold deposits, from dowsing (using specially shaped sticks to try to identify magnetic impulses from buried gold) to gold-dreaming (treasure hunters in nineteenth-century Ireland reported success upon following information given to them in dreams), to the modern use of botanical indicators (horsetail, for example, can assimilate large quantities of gold and serves as an indicator of high soil concentrations of the metal). But historically most attempts to extract gold have originated with a chance find of a flake or nugget in a body of water, as in the case of James W. Marshalls discovery of gold in the tailrace or sluice of a sawmill he was building which sparked the California Gold Rush. Indeed, the earliest gold-seekers of the chalcolithic period likely used placer mining techniques one would recognize from a film about the California Gold Rush rinsing gravel with water to uncover gold flakes and nuggets. Panning for gold is a version of this technique: sifting gravel in a large pan filled with water until the gold, which is denser than other substances, settles to the bottom. On a larger scale, one can shovel gravel into sluice boxes or rockers; on an even larger scale, one can use pressurized jets of water to dislodge rock or sediment and wash the slurry into sluice boxes.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Gold: Nature and Culture»

Look at similar books to Gold: Nature and Culture. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «Gold: Nature and Culture»

Discussion, reviews of the book Gold: Nature and Culture and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.