Answering the thriller of turquoise provenance

Turquoise has had cultural significance for Native American peoples within the southwestern United States and Mexico for greater than a millennium, and turquoise artifacts have been recovered from archaeological websites a whole lot of kilometers distant from recognized sources of the mineral.

Evidence for pre-Hispanic turquoise mining has been acknowledged throughout a lot of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico, together with as far north as Leadville, Colorado, and as far south as Zacatecas.

Detailed archaeological research of historic turquoise mines are uncommon, and little is understood concerning the timing of their exploitation or the cultural identities of the miners In this research, Alyson M.

Thibodeau and colleagues present that many geological sources of turquoise within the southwestern D.R. and northern Mexico may be distinguished from one another by way of the measurement of lead and strontium isotopic ratios. These isotopic analyses thus present a brand new strategy to examine the mining and motion of this mineral in prehistory.

The above story is predicated on materials offered by Geological Society of America.