The Ancient Tools Found in a New Mexico Turquoise Pit — The Pueblo Already Knew Whose They Were

🔔 Subscribe for new documentaries on North American history, told from the original records, the archaeology, and the Nations' own accounts. On August 29, 1857, the geologist William Phipps Blake climbed Mount Chalchihuitl in the Cerrillos Hills of New Mexico, south of Santa Fe, and found a pit cut into solid rock, roughly 200 feet across, with pine trees over a century old growing at the bottom. In 1880 the Yale chemist Benjamin Silliman Jr. watched prospectors pull a stone hammer of more than twenty pounds from its waste piles, the scrub oak handle still bound on. Mining journals reached for lost races, Spanish slave mines and a mountain that fell on a hundred miners and started the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. The pottery, the hammers, a small mining camp and the isotope studies that trace Cerrillos turquoise to Chaco Canyon tell a different story: Pueblo people worked these hills for more than seven hundred years. Kewa Pueblo (Santo Domingo), on the Rio Grande, claims these mines through inheritance, and Santa Ana, Cochiti, San Felipe and San Ildefonso Pueblos also remember working them. Kewa's jewelers still shape turquoise and shell into heishi today. The sentence Blake wrote in his journal at the rim of the pit is in the video. If you are drawn to ancient mines, Chaco Canyon, turquoise, Pueblo history and the real story behind "impossible" sites — this documentary reads the original record, the archaeology and the Pueblos' own accounts. 📚 SOURCES (all public, check them yourself) • William P. Blake, "The Chalchihuitl of the Ancient Mexicans," American Journal of Science, 1858 • Benjamin Silliman Jr., "Turquois of New Mexico," American Journal of Science, 1881 • Douglas B. Sterrett, "Gems and Precious Stones," Mineral Resources of the United States, USGS, 1912 • Joseph E. Pogue, The Turquois, Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, 1915 • Lange and Riley, eds., The Southwestern Journals of Adolph F. Bandelier, 1880–1882, 1966 • Homer E. Milford, "Brief History of Turquoise Mining and Turquoise Hill," NMGS Guidebook 46, 1995 • Hull, Fayek, Mathien and Roberts, "Turquoise Trade of the Ancestral Puebloan: Chaco and Beyond," Journal of Archaeological Science, 2014 • Thibodeau et al., "Was Aztec and Mixtec Turquoise Mined in the American Southwest?" Science Advances, 2018 • Santo Domingo (Kewa) Pueblo, "Our History" • Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, "Pueblo Revolt" 💬 How long do you think it took to dig the great pit on Mount Chalchihuitl by hand? We read every comment.