TURQUOISE IN INDIAN JEWELRY

In these notes our attention is directed to the lapidary significance of turquoise and in particular to Southwest Indian jewelry making.

Turquoise has not always enjoyed its present popularity in the western world as a semiprecious stone.

It is used principally in jewelry, and jewels come and go with styles in dress and ornament, except among primitive groups which employ the same ornaments through long periods because only those gems and materials locally obtainable are readily available.

To place turquoise in some perspective with respect to its human history and significance it is instructive to turn to the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1937 where only a few paragraphs are given to this gem. The same edition devotes pages to jade.

This is not intended to belittle the interest in turquoise nor to diminish its significance to our Southwestern Indians, but simply to remind ourselves that the present interest in this mineral has not always pertained. Indeed the period from 1900 until very recently found turquoise out of vogue in the big world. Not for fifty years was turquoise in demand and in this country never before has it been of so great interest nationwide as it is today.

Today, for the first time in many years, turquoise is again in vogue. The Christmas season of 1972, for the first time ever, witnessed newspaper advertising, from New York (Saks Fifth Avenue) through Chicago (Marshall Field) to Los Angeles (May Company) of turquoise set in Indian-made jewelry.

True, the Southwest Indian had never lost his interest in turquoise, but the large national market for jewelry had long neglected this gem.

The use of turquoise in the American Southwest, initially, and up to very recent times, employed no metal for mountings. Discoidal beads were strung and worn as necklaces; mosaics cemented to wood backgrounds served, with a bit of string through a hole and through the ear, as earrings; or turquoise was inlaid as eyes for fetishes or used as mosaic on shells worn about the neck.

The use of silver as a mounting for stones, including turquoise, dates no earlier than circa 1890. For example, Pogue's authoritative and exhaustive treatise which covers the subject of turquoise worldwide, among all illustrations used shows but a single piece from the Southwest mounted in silver, a simple ring with one stone.

Turquoise is set, except in the Southwest, in gold. Because yellow gold forms a quite different background for blue stones than does pale silver, light blue stones are favored for finer pieces, stones often so pale that they are not wanted by workers in silver. Much Persian turquoise, held at high prices, is pale, and though hard and clear, when set in silver is ineffective; the shades are so pale that they are not used in good jewelry where stones of stronger, deeper color are required.

A turquoise is not a diamond. This distinction is not made frivolously. A diamond retains its inherent character through more vicissitudes than most earthly things can survive. Turquoise is easily destroyed by heat (mere sizzling grease will ruin it), by fracture (it is quite brittle), and frequently by discoloration due to varied causes, from oils to bleaching chemicals or even to exposure, when mined, to the air and sun. The employment of turquoise for adornment, ceremonial use or in any way whatever requires the skills and techniques of the miner and the lapidary. The mineral, being brittle, must be handled with care in mining, in breaking it out from the matrix in which it often occurs, in cutting and polishing, and, for some users, in drilling. Today strands of nuggets (or discoidal beads) are still among the common pieces worked up by turquoise technicians.

Much rough stone reaches the Zunis and Santo Domingos. The Zunis constitute the largest market for rough turquoise, the Navajos for cut and polished stones. Navajos are not lapidaries but silversmiths, and purchase cut stones, usually from traders in Gallup. It is in that city today that the principal market for Indian jewelers materials is concentrated.

For the past four or five years turquoise cutters in the southwestern American area, with few exceptions, have declined to cut cabochon, i.e., rounds, ovals, marquise. (They all cut baroque, that is, free form.) Neither will they cut snake eyes (tiny rounds). All such cuts, which require more care than free form cutting and result in obtaining fewer carats from a given weight of rough material, are eschewed by our cutters. Such stones are, however, available from Persia. They also may be had in coral, cut in Italy. This accounts in some degree for the increasing use of coral in Navajo jewelry. If jewelry designs call for pear shaped stones they may be obtained, or square, or rectangular or oval, in Persian turquoise or Italian coral, but not, today, in American turquoise. The result has been a very recent but massive importation of cut stones. Persian turquoise is and for centuries has been the world's best. Very little American turquoise has ever been equal to the Persian. Some stones from Godber's Dry Creek mine have been

Beautiful Bisbee Blue OPPOSITE PAGE:

When Bisbee blue is right, it will rival the best Persian for the quality known as the "Zat". Although the blue color predominates the Bisbee stones, now and then strong green colorings appear in certain veins. Bisbee, primarily known for the depth of its blue, appears with fascinating matrix and spider web patterns. The five Bisbee transparencies reproduced on the opposite page were photographed by Jeffery Kurtzmann and represents part of the Tom McKee and Associates Collection, Scottsdale, Arizona. Scales and accessories are the instruments of measure in the commerce of turquoise gems. Neil Koppes Photo. Very good, and a portion of the stones taken through the years from the Villagrove mine near Saguache, Colorado, has been very good indeed. (The Villagrove mine has been abandoned for several years.) But the clarity and tone of color of the classic Persian stone remains the finest available.

Other facts also have played a part in the recent importa-tion of stones from Persia. One of these is the rather sudden and extraordinary interest both in this country and abroad in American Indian crafts, especially Navajo and Zuni jewelry; both tribes today use more and more turquoise.

As for the availability of turquoise, a feast or famine situation has characterized its supply through many years in the American Southwest.

Turquoise deposits, with few exceptions, are not massive, and often productive mines return good earnings for a few months or years and then the deposits are depleted, the vein pinches out or the pocket is exhausted. Years often pass during which a mine lies unworked. Then, as has often occurred, a new owner buys or leases the claim and reactivates the workings.

Very few mines in the area have produced good gem grades of turquoise steadily through long periods of years. During prehistoric (pre-Spanish) days in the Southwest mining methods were primitive and tedious, resulting in the small quantities of gem obtained by the wielders of stone hammers being highly valued. Of recent decades the great open pit porphyry copper mines of Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico have yielded large quantities as an incident to copper production. Mining costs are negligible, since Phelps Dodge and other great corporate copper producers have ripped off the overburden and exposed here and there in various pits, seams of gem material. The price paid for the rough turquoise so obtained is arranged by turquoise dealers with the copper producers. Mining equipment is designed to handle thousands of tons of ore quickly and cheaply, the heavy machines employed in these pits represent large capital, and the operators of this equipment are well paid. Thus it is of little or no interest to mine superintendents that, from time to time seams of turquoise may be exposed as they have been recently at Morenci and Bisbee in Arizona. Such rough turquoise may be worth fifty to one hundred dollars a pound, tempting a shovel operator to climb down from his machine and pocket a large quick profit, but he may be and in cases has been discharged for so doing. Nevertheless the temptation is great and much turquoise has reached the market in this manner.

The Morenci open pit has a contract with a turquoise dealer now established in Gallup, New Mexico. The rough Morenci turquoise obtained is legally his and legitimately marketed. It is probable, however, that a larger quantity reaches cutters through shovel operators who have scooped it up on the sly.

In 1967, the major mine at Bisbee uncovered good turquoise. This material is characterized by deep intense purplish blue color with dark brown matrix.

Since all the Bisbee turquoise comes out of the one pit and mostly from a small area on the east side, Phelps Dodge controls where most of the turquoise goes. The turquoise-bearing rocks are unloaded along with other rocks on the waste dump. Bob Matthews is the only man franchised by the mine to search the dump for turquoise-laden rocks. When he finds some, it is shipped to one of four places where the turquoise is cut from the rock, polished and eventually made into jewelry by Navajo craftsman or a group of silversmiths in Durango, Colorado. The finished jewelry is shipped back to Bisbee and sold at Matthews' shop overlooking the pit. Matthews' shop, Bisbee Blue, will sell cut stones when there is a turquoise surplus, which isn't often.

Mining now is in other than Indian hands and turquoise miners and cutters live, typically, in Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona.

During the past decade there has been a striking change in the affairs of turquoise miners and cutters. Most substantial turquoise mines had until lately been operated by entrepreneurs who sold their product both rough from the mine and in the form of cut stones to others who were dealers in silver jewelry. The bulk of the rough material went to the Zunis who, being skilled lapidaries, cut their own stones.

Much of the chalk-soft (oiling) turquoise went in large quantities to Idar-Oberstein in Germany. This was sold at low prices to the technicians of that town who treated it, adding color, and often cut it into spheres, the specialty of that town. Another outlet for rough turquoise even today is a group of independent cutters living in various communities in the Southwest. Many cutting shops operate in Albuquerque, others in Nevada, Utah, Arizona and southern Colorado.

The change alluded to has come about as the result of the sharp increase in the demand for and in the price of silver jewelry set with turquoise. The bulk of this jewelry is Indian made-Zuni, Navajo and Hopi, although the Hopi work to date employs little turquoise. Other groups, Cochiti, San Juan, and San Ildefonso, do some work also, but this is limited.

In order to effect a sale, turquoise cutters formerly would accept finished jewelry in payment for cut stones. Today many prefer such jewelry to cash, and can earn a substantial second profit by distributing the jewelry. Several formerly leading miners and cutters have become wholesale jewelers, notably the Zacherys of Albuquerque, and the Godbers, formerly of Los Angeles and now of Scottsdale, Arizona. The latter also have entered and ambitiously pursue the retail jewelry business.

A second and significant circumstance is the avarice of American turquoise miners who ask and obtain constantly higher prices for rough turquoise.

Because of the present extraordinary interest in and demand for American Indian handicrafts, the price of Indian jewelry has been rising and during the last three years has approximately tripled, with many Zuni items having increased in price by a multiple of four or even five. This has created substantial competition from other than Indians, specifically a number of producers of channel (inlaid) jewelry set in sterling silver frames which are centrifugally cast by the lost wax method, rather than wrought. These procedures in the American Southwest constitute a substantial market for rough turquoise and turn out well-constructed pieces using good quality stones carefully cut and set. Only the better Zuni craftsmen equal in quality the channel pieces being produced by centrifugal casters and the price of Zuni pieces of the best workmanship is several times that of the pieces produced by casting. So long as there are buyers who prefer the natural to the synthetic, the hand wrought to machine-made, there will always be a market for natural turquoise, set in the mountings of our Southwest Indians.