sixteenth century american gold and european textile costs

August 14, 2019 11:46 AM

I have a story in my head but I don't know if it's true. When europeans came to central and south america in the 16th century, they found gold used as a decorative foil because the natives had no use for it besides decoration. Buildings were covered in it. At the same time, textile was one of the most expensive commodities in europe because it was incredibly time consuming to make. What might be the comparative cost of gold to the incas vs. textile to the spanish?

I'm working on an enormous installation art project where the artist is sewing together donated fabric to blanket entire buildings.

I am struck by the potential parallels between textile and gold foil.

But am I taking crazy pills? (a) I'm not finding much about cities or buildings actually covered in gold foil - is that just a legend? (b) I'm not finding much about the historic cost of textile. (c) I have no way of comparing the relative value except to say that "People X did something in the past that is similar to something People Y are doing today."

Can you help me? Is there a parallel here? If so, is it a strong parallel? Do you have any numbers that would even make it a little more concrete?

posted by rebent to Grab Bag (6 answers total)

I remember some documentary stating that in the production of a Viking ship, the sail was the most expensive / resource-intensive part. That's from a few centuries beforehand, of course, but maybe that's a way to research relative prices: the value of sail cloth versus nails, pitch, rope, mast and spar timbers, and the other supplies for building and maintaining ships.
posted by XMLicious at 12:23 PM on August 14, 2019

Not accurate on the European side. Obviously there were particularly expensive forms of textiles and textile preparation (though a lot of that would be costs of dye and of any precious-metal embroidery), and cloth was more expensive relative to other goods back then than it is today by a considerable margin, not to mention average people then had much less disposable income to direct to clothing purchases, but...well...people wore cloth. Just about all people. If you have a sheep, you can make homespun at home.

If you want more precise information, this is what your local government pays reference librarians for. They can direct you to appropriate studies.
posted by praemunire at 12:38 PM on August 14, 2019

So in regards to the Viking sails versus the 16th century - one of the major innovations in European textiles between those two periods was the spinning wheel (either in India or China around 1000 CE, IIRC, then slowly spreading west), which greatly sped up the process of string/yarn creation (drop spindles and support spindles are a lot of fun and give more control over the product but are not fast). So while the sail might have been the most resource intensive part of the ship in the 16th century, it was a less intensive than it would have been 500 - 600 years earlier.

Also, textiles is a really, really broad category. The difference between what happens with a tapestry vs a peasant's tunic vs a cloth sail . . . it's a bit like talking about all uses of gemstones today in the same way - whether or not it's industrial or ornamental, not to mention different qualities of various gems.

Galleon sails were huge - I saw 10,000 square feet of sail quoted - which is what made them expensive.
posted by dinty_moore at 1:06 PM on August 14, 2019

Best answer: The Native American side is nonsense. The Inkas and Aztecs valued gold and silver for the exact same reason Europeans did: they're rare and pretty. Gold is used in manufacturing, but probably not much in the early 1500s.

Ordinary Inka buildings were not, of course, decorated in gold. The Qorikancha, the sun temple in Cusco, was lined with gold sheets.

The Inkas (and other Andean peoples) were already masters of textiles. Textiles were used as a currency equivalent, and the state maintained large workshops to ensure high production. The Spanish actually considered native textiles a threat and did their best to eliminate the industry and create lower-quality European-style textiles instead.
posted by zompist at 3:20 PM on August 14, 2019 [5 favorites]

Best answer: It's true that there was an abundance of gilded and gold objects in Central America and South America (for different reasons), but it wouldn't be accurate to say that it's a result of "gold used as a decorative foil because the natives had no use for it besides decoration".

In South America, due to the abundance of gold, the cultures in the area developed a variety of ways to work with gold and its alloys and tune its properties and appearance so that in addition to decorative items, they were able to use gold to make useful objects that could withstand frequent use. This was over a wide time period, starting from a thousand years before the Incan Empire and well over a thousand years before the Europeans arrived in South America, and a huge range of techniques. Many of these techniques used to work with gold were incredibly complex and time consuming and would actually work well as an example of increased value for an item due to how much effort they take. For example, they developed a method for selectively gilding gold/silver alloys by creating nanoporous gold, knowledge which was lost and took centuries to rediscover. It is used to this day for a range of applications, including in biology, catalysis, etcetera. Some of my friends work with this material, which is very valuable, but the expense comes from how time consuming it is to make, and the value from the properties it has, rather than from the gold itself.

In addition to the inaccuracy, I'd like to gently recommend against using this contrast as part of a framing this artist's work. While these gold items were recognized as useful and valuable by the people who created them and used them, when Europeans arrived in the Americas, they took many of these gold items back with them anyway, with various justifications. So there's something troubling about framing this as a contrast between European textiles as an example of something with more value due to human effort vs. 16th century American gold as an example of something that's less valuable despite being made of a precious material based on lower human effort or lack of recognition based on European explorers' descriptions of Central and South Americans.
posted by photoelectric at 5:24 PM on August 14, 2019 [8 favorites]

Response by poster: Photoelectric and zompiest, thank you for the detailed responses! I learned a lot and it helped me appreciate the americas more.
posted by rebent at 2:37 PM on August 21, 2019 [1 favorite]