Introduction to the Special Publication ‘Recent Advances in Understanding Gold Deposits: From Orogeny to Alluvium’: the importance of multi-method approaches and developing a characterisation

Gold occurs in many settings but the dynamic nature of Earth's crust means overlapping and overprinting deposit styles are common. Characterisation of mineralisation from an early stage becomes important particularly where the mineralisation is complex, in order to maximise exploration and project development success, and mining productivity. Various techniques are used at different stages of a project to characterise gold deposits. This Special Publication “Recent Advances in Understanding Gold Deposits: From Orogeny to Alluvium” offers a cross-section of some specific techniques to investigate a variety of gold deposit types. In this Introduction, we briefly compare the most common gold deposit types; summarise the techniques used to investigate them; and discuss some of the most important outstanding questions regarding understanding gold deposits. This is followed by a summary of each paper in this Special Publication. Whilst the 15 papers in this book can only showcase some of the many approaches available, they do highlight both the breadth of the available techniques and their utility in deposit characterisation. Several papers include suggestions for avenues for fruitful further research, including a paper suggesting a new approach to classifying orogenic gold deposits, and a paper describing archaeological applications of natural gold analyses.