Trade Network Supplied Chaco Canyon With Turquoise

WINNIPEG, CANADA—A new database of copper-to-hydrogen isotope ratios for turquoise resource areas in the western United States has shown that the more than 200,000 turquoise artifacts from Chaco Canyon originated in Colorado, Nevada, and southeastern California. It had been thought that the communities of ancestral Puebloans living in Chaco Canyon obtained all of their turquoise from a mining site in New Mexico. “People usually think of the Chaco Canyon as this big center [for turquoise]. But we show that people were bringing the turquoise back and forth between the western and eastern sites,” Sharon Hull of the University of Manitoba told Live Science.