New chemical analysis of Aztec turquoise artifacts suggests the stone didn’t come from the Southwestern US as archaeologists have long thought, which raises questions about the scale of long-distance ...

Though scholars have long assumed that Aztec and Mixtec turquoise artifacts uncovered in Mesoamerica were imported from the American Southwest, a new isotopic analysis suggests these artifacts likely ...

Ten minutes into the British Museum's Moctezuma exhibition, devoted to the last Aztec ruler before the Spanish Conquest, you come across a statue of an eagle with a cavity in its back. The cavity, you ...

The American Southwest, including Arizona and New Mexico, is chock-full of ancient turquoise mines. Mesoamerica, including southern Mexico and Central America, however, have few if any. So researchers ...

Close-up view of a Mixteca-style shield decorated with turquoise mosaic from the collection of the Smithsonian Institution-National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). This material relates to a ...