From K. Kris Hirst,
Your Guide to Archaeology.
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Turquoise is a blue-green mineral also known as hydrated copper aluminum phosphate. Turquoise is found in deposits throughout the world and it was cherished for its beauty by Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Longshan, and Harappan cultures; but the best known application is in the American southwest and central American cultures, where turquoise was used in abundance.

Turquoise was actively traded and clearly important to many prehistoric societies in the Americas, where it was used in jewelry, beads, pendants and inlay. There were turquoise mines throughout northern Mexico and the southwestern United States, including at least ten well-documented prehistoric mines in the Cerillos Hills near Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Sourcing Turquoise

In the 1970s, scholars began attempting to identify where the raw material for specific turquoise artifacts came from (called sourcing by archaeologists) using trace element analysis, but it quickly became clear that the methodology simply didn't distinguish between mines. Sharon Hull and colleagues have recently investigated using hydrogen and copper isotope ratios to differentiate mines in the Cerillos Hills, and have had some success connecting artifacts to specific mines.

Whether this technology will be able to be expanded to include other cultures and other mines around the world remains to be seen.

Sources

See the blog entry on Sourcing Turquoise for more information on Hull's research.

Aguilera, Carmen 1997 Of Royal Mantles and Blue Turquoise: The Meaning of the Mexica Emperor's Mantle. Latin American Antiquity 8(1):3-19.

Harbottle, Garman and Phil C. Weigan 1992 Turquoise in pre-columbian America. Scientific American 266(2):78-85.

Hull, Sharon, et al. 2008 A new approach to determining the geological provenance of turquoise artifacts using hydrogen and copper stable isotopes. Journal of Archaeological Science 35:1355-1369.

Janetski, Joel C. 2002 Trade in Fremont society: contexts and contrasts. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 21(3):334-370.

Mathien, Frances J. 2001 The Organization of Turquoise Production and Consumption by the Prehistoric Chacoans. American Antiquity 66(1):103-118.

This glossary entry is part of the Dictionary of Archaeology. Any mistakes are the responsibility of Kris Hirst.