I found this beautiful bear necklace recently and have fallen in love with it. I do not know anything about how to value this, where it came from, and I cannot find anything quite like it online. It looks like a piece created by a Native American artist to me, but I’m not certain.
His nose is a little chipped. it appears to me to be all real high quality turquoise. There is some silver in some of the matrices on the nuggets and multiple colors of matrix.
I would appreciate any help or knowledge anyone has to offer. Thank you!
This is a really interesting piece. All of the material looks authentic. When we see necklaces with fetishes we automatically think of Zuni work. However, this necklace is really different than what we would think of as traditional Zuni style, but that doesn’t mean it is not Native American made. Knowing who made the piece is going to help determine a value and unfortunately without some provenance we just don’t know. The style of silver wrap holding the bottom bear makes me think that this is possibly not Native American made. It appears that this bear fetish was a table fetish turned into a pendant, if made for a necklace we would maybe assume it would have been drilled specifically to string as a necklace piece. I believe you are correct in saying the pieces are quality turquoise. That being said the necklace does have a value, and if I saw this in a shop here in Gallup, depending on the shop it could range from a couple hundred dollars to over a thousand dollars. It would just depend on the story the shop is going to tell with the piece. You could always get a weight in carats and multiply that by a number to get a material cost and then see what similar fetishes are selling for.
I’m glad you found it interesting, i was excited to share it when i found this website. I will definitely calculate the carats and research turquoise further to try to determine a value for myself. The point about a hole for stringing is a very good one as the bear is large. Thank you very much for your thoughtful response!
The turquoise is lovely. In case you didn’t know, what looks like silver is actually pyrite which is often seen in turquoise from particular mines such as Kingman.
Awesome! Thank you very much for that nugget of knowledge i was wondering if it really was the metal silver or somwthing else so thank you for answering a specific question i didnt think to ask!
i was wondering if it really was the metal silver or somwthing else so thank you for answering a specific question i didnt think to ask! 