Gold. For men all over the world a magic, supernatural substance.
It is incorruptible, it neither rusts not tarnishes,
and so it symbolises perfection and immortality,
and men have robbed, pillaged and murdered in order to possess it.
No one has used it more lavishly or with greater splendour
than the people of ancient America.
There it was sacred and so abundant that they called it "the sweat of the sun".
To the Spaniards who conquered the empires of the Aztecs and the Incas,
it was a perpetual lure,
and for centuries they pursued the legend of El Dorado,
the fabulous golden man.
The descendants of the people who made such glorious things still survive.
But they no longer wear golden jewels on their cloaks
or worship golden statues in their temples.
The Spaniards destroyed their civilisation centuries ago
and reduced them to slaves.
They have never recovered.
But they can still tell us much about the way that their ancestors lived
and how they worked the precious metal that was the cause of their downfall.
(Shrill flute playing, light drumming)
The first great civilisation that the Spaniards met in the New World
was that of the Aztecs in Mexico.
The treasure of Montezuma...
gifts presented by Montezuma, emperor of the Aztecs,
to Cortes, the Spanish invader, when he entered Mexico.
Turquoise mosaic inlaid with shell, pyrites and garnet.
The skulls are images of the terrifying Aztec gods.
And this knife, with its chalcedony blade
and handle in the shape of a crouching Aztec warrior,
was doubtless used in the human sacrifices
when the hearts of men were cut from their chests
and lifted, still beating, as offerings to the sun.
When these objects were first exhibited in Europe they caused a sensation.
Four hundred years ago Albrecht Durer, the greatest German painter of his time,
saw them on exhibition in Brussels and was astounded by their beauty.
"In all the days of my life", he wrote,
"I have seen nothing that has so rejoiced my heart as these things,
"for I saw among them strange and exquisitely worked objects
"and marvelled at the subtle genius of the men in distant lands. "
But the conquistadors were not impressed by turquoise.
Their passion was gold.
The gold objects sent back to Europe by Cortes and his men
were almost without exception melted down for bullion.
It was the beginning of an act of sustained vandalism
that was to continue for several hundred years
as the New World was ransacked for its treasure.
Even during the 19th century,
the Bank of England was melting down each year
several thousand pounds in weight of statuettes
and exquisitely worked jewellery,
turning them into ingots.
The Aztecs, however, prized a few things even more highly than gold,
particularly the iridescent feathers of the quetzal bird.
This magnificent headdress was probably worn by Montezuma himself.
The craftsman who made it also made ceremonial shields and banners,
often using gold merely to outline the design
and set off the brilliant colours of the feathers.
Contemporary manuscripts give some idea of how the goldsmiths smelted their ore,
washed the castings in special solutions and gave them a high polish.
The people of Mexico forgot these techniques long ago,
but some of the other activities of the Aztecs,
so charmingly portrayed here, still survive.
(Shrill flute playing, drumming)
This strange ritual was ancient when the Aztec chroniclers illustrated it.
It is an act of worship.
The man in the centre, they say, represents the sun,
and the four swinging round him, the seasons of the year.
Each circles the pole 13 times before reaching the ground.
And the total of 52 turns symbolises the passage of the years
in the Aztec calendar.
Aztec towns were dominated by their temples.
This, one of the smallest, is one of the few surviving
which although much was restored gives an accurate idea of what they were like.
Today, village children play over them,
barely conscious of their original purpose,
for these were places of horror.
0n such altars, the Aztecs made human sacrifices
to the many gods that ruled their lives...
hungry, pitiless gods like Xiuhtecuhtli, the god of fire,
for whom people were roasted alive before their hearts were cut from them.
But the sun god ruled all.
If he were not regularly fed with human blood and beating hearts,
he might set and never reappear the following day.
So fearful were the Aztecs of such a catastrophe
that as many as 50,000 victims were given to the god each year.
0ne of the conquistadors has left a description of those sacrifices.
(Man) "They strike open the wretched Indian's chest with flint knives,
"and hastily tear out the palpitating heart which, with the blood,
"they present to the idols in whose name they have performed the sacrifice.
"Then they cut off the arms, thighs and head,
"eating the arms and thighs at their ceremonial banquets.
"The head, they hang up on a beam.
"The body of the sacrificed man is not eaten, but given to the beasts of prey. "
The greatest temples stood in the capital Tenochtitlan.
It was built on an island in a lake,
and the conquistadors marvelled at its splendour,
for it was as big as any city in Europe,
yet they destroyed it utterly and built Mexico City in its place.
0f the surrounding lake, all that remains are a few placid lagoons.
Among them stand small islets, originally made by the Aztecs
who cut canals through the swamps and piled up the debris between the waterways
to form artificial islands.
Here the Aztecs grew vegetables and flowers, just as the Mexicans do today.
And in the canals around them, the people of the Mexico City,
as their ancestors did, come to relax.
(# Mexican folk song)
0n their first expedition, the Spaniards were driven out of Tenochtitlan
by the Aztec warriors,
and many of them drowned in these waters,
weighed down by the gold that they had looted from the palaces and temples.
But the Aztec victory was short.
Within a few months, the Spaniards were back
to strip the city of its remaining gold,
digging up the very foundations of the temples in their search.
So completely did they destroy the city
that now to find an Aztec building still standing,
you have to go far from the capital and into the country.
And here the presence of the Aztecs is very vivid indeed.
This is Malinalco, a small settlement in a remote valley
about 70 miles south of Mexico City.
And here there has survived one of the very few groups
of comparatively undamaged Aztec buildings.
The Aztecs were a warrior nation,
and within a hundred years from somewhere near the beginning of the 15th century
they built themselves an empire, and this place, Malinalco,
was one of the last bits of territory to be added to that empire.
And here they built a small and beautiful temple
dedicated to an order of military chivalry, the knights of the jaguar and eagle.
When this was new, it glowed with colour, for all these sculptures were painted.
This, the skin of the jaguar, was painted yellow with black spots.
The jaguar is a nocturnal animal,
and the jaguar knights were dedicated to the god of the night sky.
The eagle knights, they were dedicated to the god of the sun,
for the eagle is a creature of the sun that floats in the sky.
And when they went into battle, the eagle knights wore feathers on their back
and the skull of an eagle with its beak over their forehead
in the same way the jaguar knights wore tunics of jaguar skin.
The Aztecs were fascinated by animals.
Montezuma had his own palace zoo
where he kept creatures that were brought from all over the world that was known to him.
And animals were also favourite subjects for Aztec sculptors.
Not only the jaguar, but even such tiny creatures as a grasshopper.
And, even more extraordinary,
a flea, observed without the aid of lenses,
and carved from a block of lava over a foot long.
The rattlesnake was of particular importance to them,
for this animal was sacred.
Their poets too celebrated the natural world,
and since the Aztec language Nahuatl is still spoken,
much of their verse is still alive.
(Man reading Nahuatl poem)
(Man) 0h, you do not come twice onto the earth.
Let us be happy.
Does one take flowers along to the land of the dead?
They are only lent to us.
The truth is that we go.
We leave flowers and singing and the earth.
The truth is that we go.
If it is only here on earth that there are flowers and singing,
let them be our wealth, let them be our adornment,
let us be happy with them.
(David) Even in their poetry, the Aztecs were preoccupied with death,
and if there is one symbol that obsessed them it is the skull.
This one is natural size, carved out of solid rock crystal.
The Aztecs also engraved skulls on the rock walls of their altars
and cast them in gold,
and today, skulls are still made out of sugar.
(People chatting in Spanish)
These are sold at Halloween for the festival of the night of the dead.
It's not a time of sorrow, but an occasion for making macabre jokes about death.
You can buy sugar skulls in all sizes...
huge ones, tiny ones,
and ones with names on them that you can send to a special friend.
Some people even make elaborate displays of cavorting sugar skeletons.
0utwardly, the night of the dead is a Christian festival,
and everyone goes down to the cemetery to tidy the graves, repaint them
and entertain the spirits of the departed with candles and music.
(Brass band playing in distance)
The Aztecs too believed that men had souls,
but what happened to them depended not on their conduct in life,
but on the manner of their dying.
Warriors killed in battle and men sacrificed on the temple altars
went straight to paradise, where they lived in gardens filled with flowers.
After four years, their souls return to earth as hummingbirds
or brilliantly coloured butterflies.
Death seems as vivid to the Mexicans as the god of death was to the Aztecs.
He ruled over the souls of those who died of old age
and from his land there was no return.
This magnificent golden image of him came from the tomb of a noble,
for gold belonged largely to the aristocracy and the priesthood.
It was sent to the emperor as tribute from all over his empire
which stretched 500 miles through Mexico from coast to coast.
The lists which specified the tribute that each town had to pay
fell into the hands of the Spaniards
and revealed to them the full extent of Aztec wealth.
So it was that they were able to demand and to obtain for Spain
almost all the Aztecs' gold.
The only pieces that survived are those that were buried in tombs.
The finest pieces the Aztecs owned were made not by them,
but by a neighbouring people, the Mixtec, whose craftsmen were unexcelled.
But the conquistadors seemed to have had little appreciation of the beauty of such things.
To them it was the weight, the sheer quantity of the metal that mattered.
The Aztecs watched them with scone as they pillaged Montezuma's city.
(Man) "They picked up the gold and fingered it like monkeys.
"They seemed to be transported by joy
"as if their hearts were illuminated and made new.
"The truth is that they longed and lusted for gold.
"Their bodies welled up with greed and their hunger was ravenous.
"They hungered like pigs for that gold."
(David) But though the Aztecs possessed great quantities of gold,
it was nothing compared with what the Spaniards were to discover
some ten years later when they turned their attention to Peru,
3,000 miles to the south.
The river beds of the Andes were rich in gold,
yellow grains lying mingled with the sand
and so heavy that it was easy to wash them out.
0ne of the Spanish chroniclers soon after the conquest
claimed that in all the country known to him, there was not a single river without gold.
Higher up in the mountains, 10,000, 15,000 feet high,
where the air gets thin, the gold occurs as yellow veins and spangles in the rocks.
People came up here to mine it
and with it they made marvellous things.
These delicate pieces of jewellery were made about 1500 years ago
by the Mochica people.
Even then, goldworking in this part of the world
was an ancient technique with a history 2,000 years long.
The earliest technique was to hammer the gold into thin sheets
and then press a design into it
by resting the sheets on a yielding surface like leather
and scoring the pattern with a pointed tool.
They also knew how to cut the gold sheets and bend them into shape.
Using these techniques, the Mochica made this golden pouch
in the shape of a puma.
The Chimu in the 13th century had gold in such abundance
that they used it to cover entire walls.
Their temple door carried nearly half a ton of gold
and when a priest died, his hands and arms were encased in golden gloves.
This figure of a priest is one of the Chimu masterpieces of goldwork.
It was their goldsmiths who brought the craft to its peak,
and this one piece, which is a ceremonial knife,
displays all their techniques.
The outer border of the headdress is cast.
In the centre, the gold is encrusted with turquoise.
The face is made from metal that has been hammered into a sheet
and its features have been embossed into it.
The body and the legs are formed by wrapping the metal round a wooden core.
And the blade was attached to the body by soldering.
But the Chimu empire eventually fell to an even more powerful people... the Incas.
The Incas had a civilisation just as sophisticated as that of the Aztecs.
They built great cities. This is Machu Picchu behind me.
And like the Aztecs too, they worshiped the sun.
The most sacred place in that city is the Intihuatana,
literally the "hitching post of the sun" where the priests could tether the sun by ritual
and so from the shadow cast by the spike in the middle
calculate the equinoxes and the seasons of the year.
In their time, the Incas were unsurpassed as masons.
They built the most elegant and complex structures like that circular tower.
And what's more, they built them out of granite, one of the hardest of rocks,
and the only things they had to work the granite with were stone tools
and bronze tools, and sand with which to polish the surface.
And they constructed the blocks so accurately
that they are put together without any mortar whatsoever.
This is the house of one of their noblemen, or priests,
and around it, as nearly all Inca houses have, are niches.
Here they would have placed their golden idols.
They cut these blocks all sorts of shapes and sizes.
Sometimes they cut it out of the living rock, as here.
This corner piece is one huge boulder
out of which they have cut this angle here.
And the walls of this building slope slightly inwards
and that, together with the irregular blocks which key into one another,
means that these buildings have stood in this zone of very heavy frequent earthquakes
for 500 years.
And when you look at these blocks and with the loving care and skill
with which the edges have been chamfered,
and the way that corner just fits into that there,
you can't help but feel that they actually took a positive delight
in craftsmanship of this quality.
And if that's the case, perhaps too they took a real delight in placing their cities
and laying them out so beautifully on high plateaus like this,
way, way up above the clouds.
The Inca civilisation is dead,
but the Inca people still live in the high Andes
and still speak the Inca language Quechua.
(# Incan folk song)
In Inca times, all had to pay tribute to the emperor.
Some paid in labour, and some with the beautiful intricately woven textiles
that are still made from the wool of llamas and alpacas.
As well as the textiles, the emperor also demanded tribute in gold.
This was the most sacred place in the whole of the Inca empire.
This is the Koricancha, the temple of the sun in Cuzco, the Inca capital.
Cuzco is still today a busy city, the most important one in this part of the Andes,
but little is left of the Koricancha beyond these massive bastions.
But in its heyday, the Koricancha was a place of unbelievable splendour.
In the springtime, when the priests had to conduct rituals
to ensure the fertility of the ground,
these terraces were planted with corn,
corn as high as my shoulder,
but corn the stems of which and the leaves of which were made from solid silver
and the corn cobs of which were made of gold.
And among the cornfields there were llamas grazing tended by shepherds,
all built out of gold.
And elsewhere in the temple there were gardens with trees
and butterflies and birds and lizards,
all made out of silver and emeralds and gold.
And of all that splendour, all that remains are a few tiny little golden figurines,
like this one, which lay undetected in the ruins for centuries.
Just as the Incas called gold the sweat of the sun,
so they called silver the tears of the moon.
Their country was rich in that as well,
and they worked it with equal skill, ingenuity and wit.
The greed of the Spanish invaders on seeing this spectacular treasure was unbounded.
They captured Atahualpa the Inca emperor,
and held him to ransom for as much gold as it took to fill a room from floor to ceiling.
The Incas paid the price and more.
The Spaniards took the gold and then they murdered Atahualpa.
And so the Inca people, who had once been masters of the Andes,
and had created one of the most sophisticated civilisations in the New World,
became slaves.
In their search for the precious metals,
the Spaniards demolished whole towns, tore down temples to their very foundations,
and then, as foreign conquerors so often do,
they built their own churches on the ruins.
(Man singing, small organ playing)
(Singing and organ continue)
The Spaniards took not only the Incas' gold, but also their prettiest women,
and thus founded a people of mixed blood,
some of whom today live in the houses that were built by Inca masons
long before the Spaniards came.
This single room is the home of one such family.
A man, his wife, six children,
ducks, chickens, a cat,
and several dozen guinea pigs.
In the wall above, there is a typical Inca niche with sloping sides,
but in it where once stood images of gold there are now tin mugs.
I asked why they kept guinea pigs in the house.
(Speaking in Quechua)
Speaking in the language of the Incas,
he told me that the animals in these cold mountains
needed the warmth of the kitchen fire.
He doubtless thought it unnecessary to add
that guinea pigs here are not pets but food, as they've always been.
(Speaking in Quechua)
He spoke proudly of his Inca blood,
and though he knew that there was a Spanish soldier among his ancestors,
that to him was not important because, he said, a person owed most to his mother,
in whose body he grew, and all the female line of his ancestors had been Inca.
He wanted to live, he said, as the Inca had lived.
Then there had been no need for money and everyone had helped one another.
But those days ended when the Spaniards came,
and now, he said, the Incas' glory is gone.
In the country between the sophisticated civilisations of the Aztecs in the north
and the Incas in the south, life was very different.
The people here lived not in huge imperial cities,
but in small towns grouped together under one paramount chief.
Although their life was simpler,
their goldsmiths were as skilled as any in the whole continent,
and they made objects of the greatest splendour.
These pieces come from Colombia,
and more of the ancient gold has survived there
than almost anywhere else in the whole of the Americas.
The reason for this concerns the way in which the people lived.
It was comparatively simple for the Spanish conquistador
to siphon off the Aztec and Inca gold
because it was concentrated amongst one small group of people,
the nobility and the priesthood.
But here in Colombia, it seems almost anyone could own gold.
And, what's more, many people seemed to have managed to save it
from the grasping hands of the conquistador.
But what they were able to save during life, they've been unable to do in death.
This skull is probably 500 years old and belonged to a man of the Tairona people.
The name Tairona means gold maker,
and these men who are digging up an ancient Tairona cemetery
are not looking for bones or pottery or beads, but gold.
The grave robbers, huaqueros as they're known throughout South America,
are extremely skilful in finding ancient graves.
They can recognise a site from the slightest discoloration in the topsoil
and in this they're often more astute than many an archaeologist.
Here in this cemetery they find gold on average in one grave in twenty.
And this is indeed gold.
As it happened, a piece quite unlike any that these men had found before.
(Men chatting quietly in Spanish)
Beneath the mud of 500 years, the metal is untarnished.
It's a small bird, probably the top of a decorative pin.
Unhappily, the huaqueros' interest is only in gold,
and when they carelessly throw aside broken pottery and bones and even soil,
they're throwing away knowledge. So their activities are illegal.
But it's a trade that's been going on for generations
and its impossible for police to keep efficient control over a country
as wild and as remote as this.
A second gold piece, even larger.
This is an ornament for the lower lip.
Most techniques of goldworking were known to the Tairona.
They hammered it and soldered it as others did,
but above all they were masters of the process of casting it
by the method called lost wax.
And this indeed was the way they created these pieces.
First the object is modelled in wax.
Then it's wrapped around with clay and the whole lump heated
so that the wax is driven off as vapour.
This leaves a hole inside the baked clay in the shape of the object to be cast.
Until comparatively recently,
no one had ever seen any complete ancient moulds for gold,
but a group of ten have now been discovered in a grave.
This mould is complete.
The wax model was inside it once
and when the earthenware was put round it, it was fired,
the wax came out of that hole, leaving an empty shape.
But what that shape is, no one at the moment knows.
So what we're going to try and do is to see if we are skilful enough ourselves
to complete the ancient Indian goldsmith's work
and pour molten gold into the mould.
And now it's had time to cool down.
The original craftsman, of course, would have simply smashed this mould,
but because it's so precious, we've carefully sawn down the middle.
And this...
this is what's inside.
It looks to be a little golden bell.
All this part, of course, is waste metal and that eventually will be cut away
and the whole piece burnished and polished.
And when that is done, the process will have been completed,
after a pause in the middle of something like a thousand years.
The descendants of the Tairona still survive,
here in the high mountains of northern Colombia.
The Spaniards sent several expeditions
to try and conquer the rebellious and independent Tairona.
They never totally succeeded.
All that happened was that after savage battles,
the people moved higher and higher up into the mountains,
to keep as far away as possible from the white men.
(Speaking in Indian tongue)
Eventually they were allowed to live up here comparatively unmolested
until the Christian missionaries caught up with them.
They lived in this village until only a few years ago,
when the ljka politely told them that they had listened carefully to their message
for several years and found it unconvincing.
Perhaps now they would leave them alone to pursue their own ways and beliefs.
In the large mission graveyard there are just three lonely Christian graves
and the chapel is now firmly and permanently closed.
The ljka's world abounds in symbolism.
0utside their village they maintain a sacred garden
stocked with every kind of plant known to them.
In the heart of that stand sacred houses.
The path to the men's house is itself a symbol of male fertility.
Protruding from its roof are special sticks
which maintain contact with the higher levels of the universe.
(Men chatting quietly)
0nly men are allowed here.
Women have their own house nearby.
And here the men sit and debate
and here too they chew coca leaves
and drift into a mild trance as the drug takes effect.
The leaves are chewed with powdered lime, kept in a bottle called a poporo,
and it's a matter of pride to build up a ring of lime around the mouth of the bottle.
These days poporos are modest goods,
but before the Spanish conquest, they were made from gold.
These, excavated from thousand... year... old graves,
are clear evidence that the habit of drug... chewing has great antiquity.
Perhaps too it was the visions they saw while taking drugs
that led the goldsmiths to model a strange menagerie of golden monsters,
fantastic creatures that could only have lived in the minds of the men who made them.
It is possible that the ljka even today use golden objects in their rituals.
If they do, they will certainly not show them to anyone from the outside world...
they want no part of that.
400 miles to the south lived another gold... using people, the Muiscas.
They offer their gold to their gods in the form of images of themselves,
and from these we can see how the Muiscas wore their clothes and jewellery
and what weapons they carried.
It was from these people that there came a legend
which excited the Spaniards to the point of frenzy,
and which even today is a thrilling magical one...
the legend of El Dorado.
But El Dorado was not just a legend, it was a fact.
High in the mountains above the modern city of Bogota
lies a mysterious circular lake, Lake Guatavita.
In ancient times, when a new chief took office,
his people would assemble around these shores.
Just before dawn, the chief, carrying a great treasure of emeralds and gold,
was rowed out to the centre of the lake on a raft
accompanied by his priests and his musicians.
While it was still dark, they stripped him of his clothes,
anointed his body with a sticky resin and dusted him with powdered gold
so that he was literally El Dorado, the golden one.
And then, as the first rays of the sun struck him,
the chief threw the emeralds and gold into the lake.
As he did so all the people around the margin also threw into the waters
their offerings of gold.
And then, as a final act, the chief, glittering in the sunshine like a golden god,
dived into the lake.
The gold washed from him,
and he emerged again as a naked human being.
Without doubt, therefore, these waters have received an incalculable treasure.
Eventually, the Spaniards discovered the lake
and compelled the people to cut a notch in its rim.
Water began to flow out, and round the margin they found gold.
But before they could gather much of it, there was a landslip in the cut
and the water began to rise again.
The people mutinied and the Spaniards had to be satisfied with what they had got.
Since that time, there have been many more attempts to retrieve the treasure,
for although the Spaniards took bits and pieces from around the margin,
most people think that the main treasure still lies in the centre of the lake.
But none of them have been successful,
and at least one of them had all the characteristics of a farce.
At the beginning of this century, an English company was formed
called Contractors Limited.
They came up here and made elaborate surveys of the lake,
calculated that it was something like 120 feet deep
and decided that the way they would drain it
would be to drive a gallery from outside the mountain up underneath the lake.
What precisely happened, er, no one is quite certain today.
But it seems that they did drive such a shaft
and that they did wake up one morning to find the lake almost empty
and an expanse of mud.
They got a few objects from near the margin, but they couldn't go out into the middle
because the mud was too deep.
And while they were sitting and wondering what to do about it
the sun beat down on the mud and turned it all into hard as concrete.
And then they couldn't get the gold out,
so they decided they'd have to go back to Bogota to get fresh equipment
in order to deal with the concrete... hard mud.
And when eventually they came all the way back up here,
they found that the mud, baked hard as concrete,
had actually sealed their gallery and the lake was now full of water again.
And by that time their money had run out, so they too abandoned the effort.
And so it seems that almost certainly the greatest surviving golden treasure
that lies in the middle and South America, lies in the waters of this lake,
where its makers and owners intended it should lie,
out of sight and out of reach, as an offering to the sun.