Native American Turquoise Old Pawn Jewelry: How to Identify Antique Navajo Bracelets from 1900-1930

Today I'd like to talk to you about Navajo bracelets or Denae. The Denae is what they call themselves. This is a bracelet that dates from about the 1920s and this is the kind of piece that I want to discuss. The bracelets that came from about 1900 to 1930s often the early ones would use ingot. They would have underneath you could look and you would see a crack of lure and in the silver and this comes from them using the coinage either Mexican pesos or silver dollars. Bracelets like this you want to look for wear. This particular bracelet shows wear along the edge. In fact if you look you can even see where it's worn so much that the bezel or the thing that holds the turquoise is ground down to the turquoise itself. That's a good thing. You might think it's not. It really is. Also you'll see cracks in some of the stones and that's okay if it's an early piece. If it's a piece that is all about the turquoise, say a piece of lander or Bisbee, you wouldn't want that. But on an early bracelet it's fine to have cracks, little disruption in the in the matrix on the stone. It shows wear and wear is important because we're buying these pieces for their age and if you're going to pay for a 1920s bracelet you want to get a 1920s bracelet. And I can assure you there are lots of bracelets that are made in an old style that aren't from the 20s or 30s or 1910 time frame. The earliest pieces would use handmade wire. We call it hand wrought wire. They didn't buy it. They actually would pull the wire itself or pulled wire. So it's important to look for a inconsistency in the diameter and the size of the wire. This will help you point to an earlier bracelet. Also a lot of the stones that you'll find in these early bracelets like this were simply surface finds. They were not great stones. Really the earliest mines didn't open up until really the 20s. Though you had a few before that but a lot of them really started in the 20s. So a lot of the early bracelets are going to just have very simple green or blue stones. Now a bracelet like this may have all been blue at one time. The problem is when they made it they didn't know the porosity of the stones. And this is actually measured by Mohs which has to do with the density of the stone. So a stone like this which is green may have in the beginning been blue but when the wear and usage of the stone, the wearer, the oils in their skin would be absorbed and it turns it to a green. That's actually not a bad thing. I like to see stones in early bracelets that are multi-mixed colors. So when you see a bracelet that's got different colors of stone, there's wear, you see wear along the bezels, and it has a sense of simplicity and hopefully as ingot, that points to an early bracelet. So those are the kind of criteria they want to look for when you're looking for early 1900 to 1930 Navajo or Diné bracelets.