China’s ancient gold drugs

Ancient Gold Mining Activities in India - An Overview

Gold was obtained through washing or panning of the river sands during initial periods of civilisation. With the advent of knowledge of metallurgical processing of ores it was recovered through mining of in-situ quartz reefs, and then from auriferous sulphide ores. The metal mining activities are evidenced in the form of large number of ‘ancient metal mines’ or ‘old workings’ and ‘placer mining...

The Chemistry of Gold Drugs

Bronze, Jade, Gold, and Ivory: Valuable Objects in Ancient Sichuan

If negotiations about value are essentially political (Graeber 2001:115), our understanding of past political systems is illuminated by an understanding of how and through what processes value is attributed to objects in a particular context. We cannot examine this “object value” through a focus on only one attribute or set of attributes, such as scarcity of raw material or labor investment, bu...

Gold technology of the ancient Scythians – gold from the kurgan Arzhan 2, Tuva

In 2000-2003, a ‘royal’ burial site in Tuva Republic, Siberia, dating to early Scythian times, was excavated by a joint German-Russian research program. Thousands of gold articles were discovered in the wooden chamber of ‘royal’ burial no. 5, dated to the late 7th century BC. The majority of these ornaments are decorated in the Scythian animal style. The study of the technological aspects revea...

Chinas provincial disparities and the determinants of provincial inequality

The paper explains the growth –inequality nexus for China’s provinces. The theoretical model of provincial development consists of two regions and studies the interactions of a mutual depending development process. Due to positive externalities, incoming trade and FDI induce imitation and hence productivity growth. The regional government can in‡uence the economy by changing international trans...