Georg Petersen’s Minería y Metalurgia en el Antiguo Perú was originally published in Spanish in 1970 through the Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, in Lima, Perú. Colleague, editor, and friend, Professor Duccio Bonavia, an archaeologist at the Academia Peruana de la Historia in Lima, recognized and was intrigued with Petersen’s broad interests and knowledge of geology and the use of mineral resources by ancient Peruvians, and he encouraged Petersen to publish his research. Petersen’s book is broadly appealing and useful to the specialist and non-specialist because it blends the archaeology, art history, biology, Colonial exploration, ethnohistory, geochemistry, geology, metallurgy, and the mining technology of ancient Perú. <...>

RESOURCES FOR THE FUTURE (RFF) is an independent nonprofit organization engaged in research and public education on natural resource and environmental issues. Its mission is to create and disseminate knowledge that helps people make better decisions about the conservation and use of their natural resources and the environment. RFF neither lobbies nor takes positions on current policy issues. Because the work of RFF focuses on how people make use of scarce resources, its primary research discipline is economics. However, its staff also includes social scientists from other fields, ecologists, environmental health scientists, meteorologists, and engineers. Staff members pursue a wide variety of interests, including forest economics, recycling, multiple use of public lands, the costs and benefits of pollution control, endangered species, energy and national security, hazardous waste policy, climate resources, and quantitative risk assessment. <...>

Mining capital is capital required to develop mines from exploration, feasibility studies, mine design, construction, and commissioning to operation; capital to refinance and modernize old mines; capital to purchase mining, processing, and related mine infrastructure equipment; and capital to acquire mines. The supply of commodities remains vital to the development of modern society.

This book is crafted against the backdrop of the commodities super-cycle that we had in the first decade of the 21st Century, and the mining industry having learnt severe lessons. Dr Ian Runge summarized the decade-long experiment with the prioritization of volumes and said, “The economics of mining is at an inflection point. For the last decade or so our focus has been on developing mines and bringing them into production. It is not production on its own that is important, it is how efficiently we can produce.”¹ The message was echoed by Ivan Glasberg, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Glencor at the time of penning this book: “The big guys really screwed up (during the super-cycle) by building too many mines”, and as a result he opined that miners needed to learn about supply and demand fundamentals. “The real trap in the gold industry in the past was chasing volume,” said Tom Palmer, Newmont CEO and, “No one made any real money,” according to Barrick Gold Corporation’s CEO, Mark Bristow. <...>