Welcome to the forum. It will be nice to learn more from your experiences. 
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Glad to have you on the forum!
Do you mind if I ask you a quick question? I bought this ring back in '91 and it was sold to me as turquoise, but it never really looked like it to me; at the time I didn’t know very much. We discussed it here at length several years ago, and one of the members thought it might be chalcosiderite. Could that be what it is? I’ve always wondered it is that or possibly New Lander (is New Lander actually considered chalcosiderite?). Thank you for your time!
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Ziacat, basically it’s difficult to look at a stone and really tell what its chemical makeup is. Here is an example… In the late 1980’s I was working with a Cerrillos material that was being called White Angel turquoise. A few years later, I had picked up some claims in the Cerrillos Hills and was mining it myself but wanted to know what it really was, so sent samples to Virgil Leuth at the New Mexico Mineral Museum in Socorro. Before the tests, he thought it might be chslcosiderite… but the mineral testing came back as variscite. So even top scientists can’t look at a stone and visibly tell it’s chemical composition!
For some decades there have been attempts to figure out a source analysis to track the turquoise trade routes in Pre-Columbian times with modest success. Most of the attempts have been using X-Ray Defraction. Recently there has been some interesting advances in source analysis using X-Ray Florescence. You can read about this approach on our Turquoise In America website in the blog section.
If the screenshot doesn"t come through, the X-Ray Florescence article was posted on August 9th. There are also blogs on using this method to examine the chemical makeup of material from the Grasshopper, Lander Blue and other mines.
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As for the New Lander being chalcosiderite, I’ve never seen any chemical test results that confirm that. The material that Ernie Montoya (Sunwest Silver) has been pulling out is variscite or meta-variscite… The miner for Ernie, Lee Louden, passed away recently and my latest understanding is the New Lander claim is not being worked right now.
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Thank you for all the information! When I have a bit more time later today I’ll sit down, read more closely, and look up the info you gave me. And I do understand it’s impossible to tell exactly what mine something’s from. I was puzzled, because when I bought the ring (being somewhat of a turquoise newbie), I always thought it never really quite like turquoise even though I was told that’s what it was. Thanks again for your time and knowledge.
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