A straggling band of New World settlers tried smelting silver they stole from Christopher Columbus' royal cache, new findings suggest.
Archaeologists working at Columbus' La Isabela settlement in the late 1980s discovered deposits of silver slag, which they initially thought represented the first evidence of mining in the New World.
New tests show, however, that the slag matches a kind of ore common in Spain. Frustrated and hungry stragglers probably made a last-ditch raid of a stock Columbus had brought from Europe, the researchers now believe.
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