Vintage Turquoise from the American Southwest

Vintage Turquoise items frequently come up for sale on ebay.  Many of the good, old pieces were sold to tourists from the east in the 1920's & 30's.  Navajo and other indian jewelry was all part of the Fred Harvey & Santa Fe railroad experience.  As a result estate buyers in the east, who may know nothing about turquoise indian jewelry will list it for sale very cheaply.  However, it can be very hard to tell old, crude pieces from new, shoddy work; especially if all you have to go on is a few pictures. 

The word "Vintage" is a little slippery too.  There was a huge boom in the Indian jewelry business in the mid 1970's.  People would fly into Albuquerque or Phoenix to buy in wholesale lots.  The standard deal was wholesale pricing was 1/2 of retail and jobber pricing was 1/3 of retail.  There was a lot of junk made, or imported and the plastic turquoise game reached new heights.
Lots of the "vintage" turquoise items I now see for sale on Ebay are of VERY questionable quality. 

Turquoise is a soft stone, even the good stuff is soft, and is worth lots more if it can be hardened and the color improved by adding plastic.  As the plastics got better and better it got harder and harder to tell real from treated.  Even buying directly from the Native American silversmiths didn't completely solve the problem because they could be tricked too.  In other words, I do not believe you can reliably identify treated plastic from looking at pictures on an Ebay auction.  

The best way I know to spot the good, old stuff is to look at the weight of silver.  This doesn't work well for some of the channel and inlay work because they never used a lot of silver.  However, the old Navajo jewelry pieces were heavy.  Now that silver has reached insane prices all the sellers include the weight of the silver as part of the auction description so that has actually gotten easier. 

We have examples of both kinds of work and hope to add pictures soon.