I don't know if this has been discussed before. I have been researching the mercury found under the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan Mexico. This has all the signs of an on going production of mercury. A shaft furnace works similar to the pyramid design. The chambers that are lined with mica at ground level would be where the cinnabar ore that contains the mercury would have been heated by mixing it with burning charcoal to vaporize the mercury from the ore. The vapors would travel along the mica lined conduits to inside the pyramid, where it's cooler, to a chamber where the vapors would condense into liquid mercury as they cooled. The cooled mercury would fall into a collection chamber possibly under the pyramid where it was found recently. It would appear they needed a large amount of mercury for something, I speculate it was for refining gold.
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