TUMBAGA IN SOUTHEAST-ASIA AND SOUTH-AMERICA

The word tumbaga is commonly employed in discussions of New World metallurgy to designate a copper-gold alloy used in the manufacture of predominantly decorative objects on which a gold surface is attained through depletion gilding or electrochemical replacement plating. An identical word with an apparently identical referent is found in Tagalog of the Philippines. Related forms of the word with different referents occur in other Austronesian languages, as in Malay tembaga "copper, brass," and Malagasy tombaka "silver currency." The traditional etymology for this word derives it from Sanskrit tamra, through a suffixed form that become Middle Indic (Prakrit) tambaka, tambaga "copper." Yet the alloying of copper with gold appears to have originated in the Moche culture of northern Peru around A.D. 100. Although the antiquity of the semantic shift from "copper" to "copper-gold alloy" has not yet been dated directly for the Tagalog word, historical records of the Age of Exploration indicate that cognates of Tagalog tumbaga referred to a copper-gold alloy in other parts of the Philippines and elsewhere in Southeast Asia by at least the beginning of the seventeenth century. This paper discusses how an indigenous South American alloy and a Prakrit loanword in Austronesian languages came to be paired both in Southeast Asia and in South America, and cautions against the temptation to assume prehistoric transpacific contact.