You can’t make a silken purse out of a sow’s ear, but it seems like it would be simple to transform solid ore into streams of pure silver. You just melt it, right? Many assay shops in Aspen maintained ...

According to 16th-century Spanish accounts, an Incan ruler who reigned nearly 600 years ago discovered Cerro Rico, a major silver deposit in southern Bolivia’s Andes Mountains. More recently, ...

A straggling band of New World settlers tried smelting silver they stole from Christopher Columbus' royal cache, new findings suggest. Archaeologists working at Columbus' La Isabela settlement in the ...