Huancavelica: the American mercury that refined American silver

The cinnabar of Huancavelica, worked from 1564, gave Peru its own supply of the mercury that silver amalgamation consumed. The achievement has a measured price: an estimated 56,000 tons of mercury vapour, a labour draft that named the men it took, a disease the sixteenth century already called the illness of Huancavelica, and adobe walls contaminated still. And a counterpoint — a lake beside Potosí records more mercury from pre-Hispanic smelting than from the colonial process that replaced it.