Turquoise Beads at Pueblo Bonito

                                 Pueblo Bonito, built in 1200 AD at Chaco Canyon, NM
                                 Until modern times, it was the largest apartment complex
                                  in the world.


The most treasured turquoise beads ever unearthed at Pueblo Bonito were discovered by accident.  Disarticulated skeletons, baskets and pottery had been located in a room when archeologist Neil Judd joined two Zuni Indians working there.  The floor was partially cleared and they were beginning to remove some baskets when Judd had a powerful urge to turn once more towards the north end.  The second stroke of his trowel brought several beads to light.  In a few seconds his awl and brush revealed a carefully coiled turquoise necklace and two pairs of perfect blue turquoise eardrops:

            “I cannot adequately describe the thrill of that discovery.   It was so unexpected, so unforeseen.  A casual scrape of a trowel across the ash-strewn floor, a stroke as mechanical as a thousand other strokes made every day, exposed the long-hidden treasure.  The room had been paved with flagstones, and it is my impression that a hollow between two flags had been deliberately chosen as a hiding place; that the necklace had been coiled and laid within and the whole concealed by a handful of sandy mud that was spread out, and packed down, and then disguised with ashes until the patch was indistinguishable in the room’s darkness.”*

                                      The legendary turquoise necklace and earrings found at
                                      Bonito, now on view at the National Geographic Society

            This was one of the very few complete turquoise necklaces ever unearthed in a pueblo ruin.  Undoubtedly, there were many more but grave robbers in the southwest favored turquoise above baskets or pottery, so little remains of this ancient wealth.

            The remarkable thing, Judd recounts, is that within minutes of the find, with no word or signal, every Zuni and Navajo workman was peering over the wall at this spectacular find.  Judd says that he can only attribute this to native intuition or mental telepathy as he and the two Zunis were completely absorbed in the task of blowing sand away from the beads and had not sounded a warning of this incredible find.

            No needle in the camp was fine enough to pierce these small and perfect beads.  Finally, they used a tenor banjo string to restring them.  Only unidentifiable traces of the original stringing material remained, but they were clearly arranged in four strands that had been tied together.  Judd believes it was hidden under the flagstones by its original owner.  A room nearby exhibited evidence of prehistoric looting and vandalism.  Eight out of ten skulls had been kicked aside and the remainder of the skeletons were dragged about and overturned.  Undoubtedly many turquoise beads buried with their owners were stolen during these raids.  The room yielded only six rectangular turquoise beads, 126 discoidal turquoise beads, seven miscellaneous pendants and a handful of shell and stone beads, a very small amount for ten Bonito burials.  

            The prehistoric bead maker required infinite patience.  Each tiny disc was individually constructed; crudely shaped, ground thin, and then drilled for the initial stringing and final polishing.  All stages of bead making are visible through unfinished turquoise beads found in the burials, family rooms and trash heaps at Bonito.

            After a piece of turquoise had been worked to the right size, the edges were broken off to reveal a discoidal blank prepared for drilling.  A sandstone abrader with a grove was used for rounding and smoothing the beads.  Prehistoric beads indicate that many were worked with stone-tipped drills until the opposite side was just pierced and then the bead was reversed and the hole enlarged and rounded out.  Most of the tools used by the bead makers are lost.  It’s still a mystery how they were able to produce beads with holes too small to be pierced by a modern beading needle.  The smallest turquoise bead found at Bonito measured 1.8mm in diameter (barely 1/16^th of an inch) with a hole about .75mm perfectly symmetrical in microscopic detail.  It’s been suggested that dry tubular grass stem or cactus spine was used with fine sand providing a cutting medium.

            Emil Haury, who made a study of minute beads in the prehistoric pueblos, experimented with a basic shaft drill capped with a thorn from the barrel cactus.  Using damp sand as an abrasive, he rotated the drill between his hands and in less than fifteen minutes, bored a hole .94mm in diameter through a rock 1.47mm thick.  In Chaco Canyon where Pueblo Bonito is located, myriad native species abound with tough spines like the barrel cactus.

            Turquoise pendants and eardrops found at Bonito are all variations of a basic keystone shape, drilled at the narrower end for suspension.  “They range in length from 3/16^th of an inch to 2 and 3/4^{th of} an inch.  Their thickness goes from 1/16^th to 1/4^th of an inch.  Matched pairs of turquoise pendants were worn as eardrops, but smaller pendants occasionally were interspersed with discoidal beads in a necklace.  One necklace located in the burial of an elderly woman had eight turquoise pendants from 3/16^th to 3/8^th of an inch long and was used as a three coiled bracelet.

                                                   Shell finger rings, turquoise pendants and  
                                                   necklace worn as bracelet at Pueblo Bonito

             This was probably the type of bracelet described by Mexican Indians to Melchoir Diaz in 1540 as a typical ornament of pueblo country Indians.  They described the women as wearing a hairstyle that left the ear exposed, from which they hung many turquoises, as well as about their necks and wrists.

            One of the most significant caches of prehistoric turquoise was discovered in 1896 at Bonito.  Mosaics, carvings, beads, and pendants adorned the skeletons in burial rooms.  A breast pectorial of polished jet with its four corners set with turquoise was among the most remarkable of the thousands of ornaments found.  A turquoise jewel basket, cylindrical in shape and six inches long with a diameter of three inches, rested near one of the skeletons.  It was made of thin splints over which a mosaic of turquoise had been cemented with pinion gum.  The basketwork had long ago decayed but the mosaic was held in position by the sand in which it had been buried.  1214 pieces of turquoise were used in the construction and it contained 2150 disc-shaped turquoise, 152 small turquoise pendants, and 22 large turquoise pendants, some carved to represent birds.  A basket with turquoise and shell beads strung along its edge in parallel rows lay near other remains.  Several skeletons wore turquoise beads, numbering more than three thousand, about their neck, breast, waist, wrists and ankles.  The chamber is thought to contain the remains of priests, medicine men or other significant personages because of the excellence and abundance of burial goods. 

            Another turquoise fetish bead from Bonito was a bird figure which must be regarded as a ritual object.  It was drilled through the chest at an angle that caused the bird to fall backwards and lie horizontally if suspended from a cord.  Archeologists surmise that the bird was bound to a staff or other ritual object as part of some ancient ceremony.  Five examples of this sort of bird were eventually unearthed by two separate expeditions that worked at Pueblo Bonito.              

           

 *The Material Culture Of Pueblo Bonito by Neil Judd

Next post: August 14: Shell beads found at Bonito