Not in my experience. With a rotary bit you have to go painstakingly slowly to drill stone, and natural material tends to chip, flake, is brittle and tends to break easily. The bits tend to dull fairly quickly as well.
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How did they drill back in the day? It had to have been painstakingly tedious.
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It is tedious. It was originally done very slowly with hand drills. I can’t even imagine how long it took to make prehistoric beads. They must have used flint awls, and bow drills to drill holes.
The real breakthrough I was around for was when ultrasonic drilling became widely available in the early 70’s. There was an absolute explosion of drilled turquoise nuggets, and offshore heishi, which used to come in for stringing in 5 gallon buckets.
The trading company I worked for in Gallup used to string necklaces by the grocery bag full, and we’d go around door knocking, and wholesale entire bags full to other trading companies around town.
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@Islandmomma,
Looking at the matrix and host rock these look stabilized to me.
Generally you can see, feel, and hear the difference between treated and non-treated.
With treatment the colors change to a permanent wet sort of look especially when looking at the host rock. Natura host and matrixl almost always retains its lighter dry look compared to a wet look.
Natural feels cooler to the touch and there is a difference in the sound when lightly tapping stone on glass. In comparison, natural has a tink, tink sound where as treated has more of a thump, thump sound.
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So you have Jewelry all over your house that sometimes you find something you never knew you had 
. Sounds like me in a few years!!
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Keep up the good work! It’s so much fun to find something that you didn’t remember having.
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Remember to tell your children to not toss or donate anything without looking in it first (my grandmother hid jewelry everywhere, and in astonishing spots. Don’t know how she remembered where they were).
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I have. My late MIL had stuff stashed everywhere. We literally had to go through every single thing in the house.
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