New Mexico Geological Society Annual Spring Meeting — Abstracts

Prehistoric sites in New Mexico have yielded dozens of elongate, banded travertine objects, some of which were perforated for use as pendants. These objects are usually found singly, suggesting that they are not components of an item such as a necklace, but may instead be ritual objects. The rarity of these travertine artifacts, coupled with their widespread distribution throughout the southwestern United States, suggest that they were important as a ritual tool across a wide geographic area. Pendants in the Maxwell Museum’s collections have been collected from Pottery Mound and Tijeras Pueblo, NM. Our goal is to identify the most likely travertine deposit as a source for these pendants. Preliminary examination suggests that these items come from a single source as they all exhibit similar patterning of even, horizontal black bands (likely manganese oxide/hydroxide) alternating with buff-colored bands. They do not exhibit crenulations typically observed in travertine flowstone, but could be vein materials associated with travertine deposits. Based upon existing knowledge of travertine deposits in New Mexico, travertine locations in central New Mexico that are the most likely source for these pendants include Mesa Aparejo and Mesa del Oro travertines on the west side of the Rio grande rift, west of Belen. As a preliminary means of describing the subtle variations in these pendants and in hand samples from various travertine deposits in central New Mexico, we have developed a set of measurements and descriptive quantifiers for pendant characteristics such as length, diameter, degree of taper, degree of human interaction, width of bands and band distribution. Future provenance identification should be possible using geochemical typing of travertine.