The Quicksilver Question

Every major civilization on earth produced mercury at industrial scale. Every one of them killed workers for it. Every one of them encoded the chemistry into their sacred traditions. Every one of them placed it in specific geometric positions within their most significant engineered structures.

The ritual explanation - that mercury was sacred pigment, symbolic of the underworld, ceremonially significant - accounts for individual finds. It does not account for two hundred and sixty thousand tonnes. It does not account for populations poisoned for five millennia. It does not account for imperial suppression, armed transport under Roman law, workers sealed inside pyramids to protect secrets. It does not account for a ground plane one hundred million times more conductive than the freshwater aquifer Nikola Tesla spent his fortune trying to reach.

The Quicksilver Question is an industrial archaeology investigation that follows a single material, liquid mercury, across eight thousand years of global history and asks the question that a century of research has never asked in aggregate:

What were they building?

From the tunnels beneath Teotihuacan where large quantities of mercury were found in 2015 and the volume has never been published, to the Qin emperor's tomb still outgassing mercury into the atmosphere two thousand years after being sealed, to the documented trade corridor running through the American Southwest where cinnabar deposits sit unexamined in Yavapai County, Arizona, this investigation assembles the global evidence in one place for the first time.

Five testable hypotheses. All executable with existing technology. None requiring new excavation.

The evidence is not thin. The question has simply never been asked in one place.

Until now.