Depletion guilding:

Electroplating!

Depletion gilding- used by late Bronze Age inhabitants of the Middle Volga page: 1 5

share: Hanslune +2 more posted on Jul, 13 2012 @ 03:28 PM

A team has discovered a culture using sophisticated gilding techniques on the Eurasian steppe grasslands of present-day Russia, dating from 1850-1700 B.C. at the beginning of the Late Bronze Age.

These people learned to (sic) covered pendants with a foil no more than one-tenth of a millimeter thick made of an alloy of gold and silver known as electrum. While the overall gold content of the foil is less than silver, through depletion gilding ancient Eurasian metallurgists were able to manipulate the concentration of gold on the outer surface to make the ornaments look like solid gold.

These were people associated with the Srubnaya/Srubna/Srubnik culture. They mined copper and produced metalwork regularly on a small scale even though they were not members of urban civilizations that are more commonly associated with such early technologies

Before these findings, this type of gilding method had only been found before in the Andes and in Mesopotamia

https://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread860481/pg1