OK, something told me to gently wash this buckle yesterday, and that allowed me to see the iron pyrite in it. And that helped me to see, that these nice natural nuggets are actually from the Morenci mine, over in SE Arizona, near New Mexico. 😎
There's a lot of cool stuff to learn, about Morenci turquoise, like the fact that Geronimo gave one of the early white "owners" of the mine a lot of trouble. 😉
And bizarre as it sounds, the owners once buried a heck of a lot of the stuff, on purpose. 😲 The Morenci mining company mines copper, but the workers found this turquoise, too, and removed some by taking it home in their lunchboxes. 😁 The owners became upset with the distraction from copper mining, and buried a crapload of it, on purpose, to get copper mining back on track. 🙄
Sounds pretty nutty, but the fact remains, that it's the biggest copper mine in the U. S., and still produces 750,000,000 pounds of copper a year! 😲 That's a lot of copper.
I grabbed another pic, of it, plus a pic of this book I just finished. This book is fiction, but Mr. L'amour still provides a lot of information about the Anasazi, who were here in the times of the ancient Mayas, and traded with them. That would before the times of the Navajo & Hopi, both latecomers, comparatively. 😉