Chemical analysis of metallurgical artifacts from La Isabelathe settlement Christopher Columbus founded on his second trip to the New World in 1494is challenging the long-held notion that the site is where Europeans first mined and processed precious metals in the New World. A recent lead isotope analysis of La Isabela artifacts reveals that the settlers were not, as archaeologists thought, extracting silver from Caribbean ores but were trying to pull the metal out of materials they'd brought from Spain.
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