วัสดุทองคำGold

Gold is the earliest metal on the human record. Small quantities appear in Spanish caves from around 40,000 BCE; the oldest gold artefacts in the world come from the Varna Necropolis in Bulgaria, fifth millennium BCE — the same cemetery that produced the first faceted carnelian beads. Egyptian and Mesopotamian gold objects follow in the fourth millennium BCE.

In amulets, gold's job is usually to say who is wearing it. A Roman boy wore a bulla, a locket-like pouch with a protective amulet inside, from nine days after birth until he put on the toga of manhood. Upper-class families could afford bullae of gold or covered in gold foil; everyone else used lead, leather and cloth. The girls' equivalent is defined by Isidore of Seville: "Lunulae are female ornaments in the likeness of the moon, little hanging gold bullae." Plautus has Epidicus ask a girl, "Don't you remember my bringing you a gold lunula on your birthday, and a little gold ring for your finger?" The same charm, on two children, in two price brackets.

Elsewhere gold is one option in a list. Egyptian amulets were made of faience above all, but also of stone, metal, bone, wood and gold. Late antique sheet amulets from Palestine and Syria were rolled from silver, gold, copper and lead. Milagros, the Latin American votive charms, are made from gold, silver, tin, lead, wood, bone or wax, depending on local custom and on what the person can spend. Part of the Thetford treasure in Norfolk is a gold box made to hang round the neck, found to contain sulphur for its evil-repelling qualities.

Gold is also the benchmark other materials are measured against, and sometimes beaten by. Jade reaching the Chinese court from Khotan is described as having status-value exceeding that of gold or silver. In the Han jade burial suits the gold is demoted to thread: emperors' suits were sewn with gold wire, princes and marquises with silver, their children with copper, lesser aristocrats with silk. Inference — a material hierarchy written into a burial regulation is the clearest statement in this atlas that what a charm is made of is a claim about the person in it.

Gold amulets are sold everywhere amulets are sold, and are the class of charm most likely to be melted rather than kept — which is a survival bias running the opposite way to faience. The Aztecs, the gold literature notes, called the metal literally "god excrement".