Cinnabar ore is the source of a bright red pigment (mercury [II] sulfide, HGS), a substance that was highly valued in the Central Andes during prehispanic times. It is traditionally believed to come from Huancavelica in south-central Peru, although some scholars have argued that a prehispanic cinnabar source existed at Azogues near Cuenca in southern Ecuador. It has also been suggested that the cinnabar recovered at archaeological sites in northern Peru such as Baton Grande may have come from this putative Ecuadorian source. In this article, the historical and archaeological evidence supporting this position is evaluated and found to be insufficient to sustain the Ecuadorian Cinnabar Hypothesis. Moreover, recent mercury isotope analysis of archaeological samples from northern Peru supports the earlier hypothesis that the source of the bright red pigment, sometimes referred to as vermilion, was cinnabar ore mined in Huancavelica. This source is located over 850 km to the south of archaeological sites such as Batdn Grande, Chongoyape, and Pacopampa.

In mid-July 1594 a notary recorded the last wishes of an elite woman on her deathbed in Quito. Ysabel de Baeza was a native of the old Kingdom of Granada, a four-time widow, owner of some houses in Seville and a modest estancia in Ambato, a few days' ride south of Quito. She also claimed five slaves: Magdalena and her four children, Luisa, Felipe, Juan, and Antón. Doña Ysabel's real estate was to go mostly to her children and grandchildren in Quito, but the fate of the slaves was more carefully circumscribed. Magdalena would serve her dying master's daughter for four years, after which she would be freed. Luisa was to serve Baeza's granddaughter, Leonor de Ayala, and Felipe a great-grandson, Alonso Bonifaz, both “until the time when they ransom themselves (se rescaten) and give each one on their own behalf four hundred pesos of current silver.” The younger Juan and Antón were to stay in the household of Baeza's executors until they also freed themselves, each for 300 pesos. The slaves were not to be sold by these temporary masters, and the 1,400 pesos thus collected was to be placed in a chaplaincy fund (capellanía) administered by Quito's Augustinians. The masses thus financed by the self-redemption of Ysabel Baeza's slaves would in turn help release her soul from the temporary captivity and untold pain of Purgatory.

This article examines the strange career of platinum, an element first identified in colonial Colombia. Around the turn of the eighteenth century, a high-grade platinum alloy, nicknamed 'platina,' appeared alongside gold dust in the alluvial mines of Colombia's Pacific lowlands and quickly caused problems for mine owners, merchants, and the Spanish Crown. The silvery metal was impossible to melt with available technology, and was therefore considered useless, but since it was dense, shiny, and did not oxidize it could be passed off as low-grade gold to unsuspecting merchants. Crown officials lashed out at slaves and free people of color for using platina to debase gold dust in petty exchanges, but they were not the only ones. Records show that mine owners and itinerant traders regularly added raw platinum to gold ingots, creating difficulties at Bogotá's royal mint.Crown attempts to forbid platinum mining and circulation grew more elaborate until the mid-eighteenth century, when scientists in England, Sweden, and other parts of Europe began to experiment with the mystery metal and publish results. They had reportedly received bits of platina mixed with gold dust from Spanish merchants in Cartagena de Indias, but more importantly via the contraband slave trade to the Atrato River, on Colombia's Caribbean coast near the Isthmus of Panama. The story of how platinum went from object of loathing to scientific sensation in the course of the eighteenth century illuminates some of the darker corners of the Spanish Enlightenment, both on the Peninsula and in the American colonies. It also shows how clandestine exchanges between subjects of clashing empires, including enslaved Africans and budding tinkerer-scientists, could have unexpected consequences at both ends of the 'commodity chain.'The early history of platinum is frequently glossed by historians of science, but without noticeable interest in its shifting cultural significance or close ties to slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. Almost nothing is said of its Colombian context,

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