{"id":448,"date":"2007-08-26T09:47:18","date_gmt":"2007-08-26T15:47:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mjhinton.com\/wild\/?p=448"},"modified":"2007-08-26T09:47:18","modified_gmt":"2007-08-26T15:47:18","slug":"the-turquoise-traders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.ahwilderness.com\/?p=448","title":{"rendered":"The Turquoise Traders"},"content":{"rendered":"

GEMLAND.NET \u00c2\u00bb Blog Archive \u00c2\u00bb The Turquoise Traders<\/a> <\/p>\n

The drive through New Mexico had been long and tedious, and though I was tired, I was also excited to reach my goal. Just a few more miles, I thought to myself, and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be there. This was to be the first of several places I had wanted to visit that are now known to be intimately tied to the history of turquoise in the New World.<\/p>\n

I was expecting the place I had been seeking to just jump out at me. But no, it turned out that it wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t that noticeable. Had I not been looking for it, I would have just driven on by, like the thousands of cars and trucks a day that zoom north and south between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, oblivious to the little group of small hills just east of the Interstate \u00e2\u20ac\u201d another of those redundantly named places in the Southwest \u00e2\u20ac\u201d the Cerrillos Hills. (Cerrillos means \u00e2\u20ac\u0153little hills\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, in Spanish.)<\/p>\n

Probably not one person in a thousand moving along that asphalt ribbon could have told you that in those barren looking hills is the oldest continuously mined site in North America. Like so many other places in our modern world where remnants of past greatness lie within reach of our everyday lives and yet go easily unnoticed and unconsidered, the Cerrillos Hills and their rich mines once shaped empires.<\/p>\n

The Indians of the Southwest, the Aztecs of Mexico, and later the Spaniards, would all come to know of this place and the treasure it once offered \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the mineral we call turquoise.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

GEMLAND.NET \u00c2\u00bb Blog Archive \u00c2\u00bb The Turquoise Traders The drive through New Mexico had been long and tedious, and though I was tired, I was also excited to reach my goal. Just a few more miles, I thought to myself, and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be there. This was to be the first of several places I had … Continue reading The Turquoise Traders<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,15,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anasazi","category-newmexico","category-other-peoples"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ahwilderness.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ahwilderness.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ahwilderness.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ahwilderness.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ahwilderness.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.ahwilderness.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.ahwilderness.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ahwilderness.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.ahwilderness.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}