Years ago (when the price of computer links across calling areas to a
national laboratory was prohibitively expensive) I was attending
anthropology classes in Graduate Chemistry building at Stony Brook
University. There, Phil Weigand, Ph.D. had a NSF grant for the study
of ancient turquoise mine samples gathered from the American Southwest
by Dr; Kelly and others at the University of Illinois I think, using
neutron activation trace element analysis in statistical hyperspace.
Many dangerous source mines had been entered and I am given to
understand, also by another Japanese researcher for similar study.

The idea was to relocate, if you will, the origin of artifacts sources
when such artifacts as mentioned in this op-ed piece are found without
known local sources, i.e., there are no Mayan sources of turquoise
known (then) and to authenticate with the small removal (20 milligrams
or so) of a sample for testing. One of the problems was with clinal
sampling, i.e., variation across the matrix of deposit and the
questions of how, for example crypto-crystalline minerals are thought
to be formed, that very process introducing variability. I once
watched other samples go behind the wall in small glass containers to
be activated, the lab is now run by a consortium of universities,
Stony Brook the lead, where the Dept. of Energy once did.

At the time I was also told informally by another anthropologist, that
at Pueblo Bonito I think don't quote me, there was a room full of
turquoise pieces on the outside of the walled town, an adjacent
structure only accessible form the exterior of the settlement that it
was said the US National Parks Service would not discuss, because of
two burials in the style of MesoAmerican ritual were found in it. As I
was told we were trying to figure out how to extract "El Nino" data
from the archaeological record.

Also, while there was just published "The Man-Eating Myth" by William
Arens a social anthropologist with whom I had undergrad and graduate
classes, in which he disputes the colonial descriptions and other
descriptions of "cannibalism" purported by invaders and others
practicing a territorial imperative, for example, those outsiders who
are usually attributed to such reported rituals, beyond the "gustatory
cannibalism" that results from dire extreme circumstances, which often
is proscribed because it leads to a certain horrible disease.

Anyone want to comment about turquoise among the Maya?

George Myers