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About the stones

Cerrillos Turquoise

Cerrillos is a unique form of native New Mexican turquoise and has a history entwined with both ancient Native peoples of the Southwest and more recent American mining companies.

The Cerrillos mine is the oldest mine of any kind in North America. Located ten miles south of Santa Fe, it was the site of the largest prehistoric mining activity on the continent. Using only stone axes, mauls, antler picks, and chisels, Pueblo miners removed 100,000 tons of solid rock to create a pit mine 200 feet deep. They dug other vertical shafts into the ground to reach veins of turquoise.

The Pueblo peoples continued to extract turquoise from the Cerrillos mine until the 1870's when a silver mining boom raised interest in the area. The Tiffany Company in New York and its associates bought up the mine area and extracted $2,000,000 worth of turquoise between 1892 and 1899.

Peridot

The origin of the name peridot is uncertain. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests an alteration of Anglo–Norman pedoretés (classical Latin pæderot-), a kind of opal, rather than the Arabic word faridat, meaning "gem".

The earliest use of the word in England is in the register of the St Albans Abbey, in Latin, and its translation in 1705 is possibly the first use of "peridot" in English. It records that on his death in 1245, Bishop John bequeathed various items including peridot to the Abbey.

Peridot is one of the only gemstones that forms in only one color. Peridot crystals have been collected from some pallasite meteorites.